Overview

Shantell Martin’s work has, for more than a decade, entranced audiences around the world – from the USA to Japan – in its intuitive energy, skill and bravura. With her highly personalised language of characters, faces, creatures and messages, Martin invites viewers to actively engage in the creative process. Using drawing as a physical stream-of-consciousness, her work is characterised by a unique freedom, expressed through the possibilities of her chosen ‘canvas’ – whether a piece of paper or textile, a sculptural surface, wall or screen.  Her recurring motif, ‘WHO ARE YOU’, appears time and again in her work, vocalising her vision to interrogate “who we are at the core, as people”. Bridging the fine art and commercial worlds, she has – since her beginnings with live performance drawing in the mega clubs of Tokyo – navigated creative worlds to interrogate and play with the role of artist and viewer. This monograph charts – for the first time – the career of this prolific and popular artist, including early pieces such as X Dot Martin (a collaboration with Martin’s grandmother on over 70 pieces of embroidery), large-scale murals and commissions, and collaborations with museums, technical institutes, musicians and fashion brands. 

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9781912122349

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Shantell Martin is a British visual artist best known for her signature black and white small and large-scale drawings. She has had solo shows at The New Britain Museum of Art, 92Y Gallery, and the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, New York. Martin has collaborated with iconic brands such as Nike, Max Mara, Tiffany & Co. as well as with New York City Ballet and Kendrick Lamar for Miami Art Basel. Martin is an adjunct professor at NYU Tisch ITP and a visiting scholar at MIT Media Lab. She lives and works in New York and Los Angeles. Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968) is a world-renowned curator and the artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London. Alongside his curatorial practice, Obrist has written extensively on and around contemporary art, with a particular interest in the interview format. Katharine Stout, Director at the Focal Point Gallery and Associate Director and co-founder of the Drawing Room, has been Deputy Director of Institute of Contemporary Arts, London since 2017, and previously as Head of Programme since 2013. Prior to the ICA, Stout was Curator of Contemporary Art at Tate Britain (1999 to 2013), curating exhibitions with artists such as Liam Gillick, Gary Hume, Eva Rothschild and Patrick Keiller, group exhibitions such as ‘This Was Tomorrow: Art & the 60s’, as well as co-curating the Art Now series, Turner Prize exhibitions and Collections displays. She was previously the Contemporary Art Consultant at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, where she inaugurated the contemporary art programme. Stout serves on the Board of Artist’s Studios organisation, Tannery Arts, and has published numerous texts on contemporary art and artists in books, journal and magazines.

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