With Cotton, Christopher Martin Tells a Story of Race in America

As a tattoo and textile artist, Christopher Martin is importantly guided by the tradition of folk art. His reverence for text, appreciation for the history of his material and careful collection of imagery are powerful reminders of how folk and outsider art traditions can be reinvented for new generations, new eras. Martin’s work is the stark, blunt immediacy that challenges the weight of our world with naked solidarity.

Even in a crowded group show, it's impossible to miss Christopher Martin’s work. His large-scale banners, usually sewn out of black and white cotton, depict graphic images—graphic in both senses of the word. His symbols (ropes, chains, and American traditional tattoo) pull from the images of racist ideologies, but Martin reclaims them, manipulating and twisting their hateful intentions while laying bare the continued relevance of this work, even in “progressive” places like the Bay Area. “I just used that energy in a more productive way,” he explains.

Growing up in Greensboro, North Carolina, Martin was well aware of his hometown’s racial dynamics: Confederate flags hung at people’s front doors. “Moving to the Bay Area, I had this moment of reflection of where I came from,” he says. “I had to leave it to figure out what I wanted to speak about through my artwork.”

Since storytelling is a big tradition within the South, he tries to capture this folklore through his art and learning more about what inclusivity means in America. By using variations of cotton in his work, both paper and fabric, he pays homage to the history that is connected to farming and free labor, which plays deeper into the narrative of his roots while being a free black man today. Also, music is inherently woven into black culture, so he’s naturally gravitated to the blues. Martin loves discovering stories through music because the lyrics are anecdotes of slavery and the south.

The clash between African Americans and white America has led Martin to another layer of intention: by limiting his color palette to black and white fabric, he speaks to a subtle undertone of the tension between black and white Americans.

Helping him find that voice has been the NURE collective (formerly known as the Black Mail collective), a group of Black artists supporting each other with shared studio space and exhibition opportunities. “It feels comforting,” Martin says, “having that safe space to create artwork with a tribe of fellow Black people in this time where so many of us are getting pushed out.”

Martin was recently part of the San Francisco Art Institute exhibition Vanguard Revisited: Poetic Politics & Black Futures, a show that revisited photographs of the Black Panthers social programs and looked to the future via work by local contemporary artists. “It’s a little bit of weight on my shoulders,” Martin admits, “but I have great pride in participating and pushing this storyline of Black Power.”

And Martin’s ties to his roots extend beyond source material— he and his mother run an apparel business together called Cypher (she knits the beanies). He acknowledges the symbols in his work can be divisive: some find the violence implicit in the images he uses triggering. He feels the emotional strain of working with the material himself, a psychic state he counters by listening to and playing the blues. Ultimately, he finds the process of making his art a healing one.

He continues to create, build and nurture his own structures and radicalize the notion of for us, by us. Martin believes the revolution starts with self, what we practice and consume and how we take care of ourselves. By making work that speaks to his own experiences, and holding a mirror up to not just historical but contemporary injustices, Martin dreams of ushering in the creation of a more equitable world.

For real time updates of his work, follow @chrispymartin on Instagram.