Shantell Martin is known for drawing faces and stick figures, trees and ladders, eyes and birds across long white walls and all over rooms. With her black pens and markers, she adds inspirational slogans: “Be well / eat well / do well,” “Sit be breathe,” “Are your lights on,” “New you / New who / New York,” “Resist the usual,” “Now who do you wish to be / Count to one two free.”
Two questions appear again and again, written in her drawings and stickers: “Who Are You” and “Are You You.”
“It’s a seed. Also, I’m obsessed. It doesn’t matter how educated we are, how well traveled … we all stumble to answer this question. As an artist I ask, ‘What are the words that describe who we are at the core?’” says Martin, who speaks at Northeastern University at 4 this afternoon in connection with an exhibit of her art on view at the Boston school’s Gallery 360 through March 12.
“People don’t know how to answer it.” Martin says. “I don’t know if we have the words to describe who we are without describing where we’re from and what we do and the roles we play. Which is crazy. I don’t know if you’ve ever had an existential moment: Why am I here? If we know who we are as people, we’d be able to answer that question of why we’re here.”
Perhaps the question intrigues her, she says, “because I’m mixed race and because of where I grew up in London. And fundamentally it affects all of us. … It’s worth planting that seed to see where it goes.”
As to her own background: “My Mom’s English and my Dad’s Nigerian, but my Step-Dad’s English. So all my stepbrothers are blonde and blue eyes. Then I grew up in a white working class council estate [public housing] in southeast London.”
She still speaks in the accent of her childhood Thamesmead neighborhood. “I didn’t know I was black when I was younger,” Martin says. “It’s an interesting perspective of walking out of the house and people bringing it to you.”
She went on to study graphic design at Central St. Martin’s University. Then she moved to Tokyo in 2003, where she VJed (“visual jockey”), projecting her drawings atop DJs and dancers and musicians in clubs. In Japan, she says, “you’re Japanese or you’re a foreigner. So I’m quite happy to play that role.”
She moved to New York in 2009. She currently splits her time between Brooklyn and an art studio in Jersey City, New Jersey. In the United States, “I get treated one way and then I open my mouth and I get treated different in certain situations” because of her London accent.
“I don’t bring these things to the table in my work in a sense. The work is to be free,” Martin says. “I want it to inspire. I want people to smile. I want people to look at it and think they can go do it in their own way.”
In New York, she found “they didn’t have this VJ scene or this club scene that they had in Japan. So I kind of devolved into pens, into analog.”
“I do something very simple, I work with line,” Martin says. “The work is to try to master that line and make it a line that is recognizably mine.”
“I draw in black and white,” Martin says. “It’s for the purpose of being calming and creating a space where people are drawn into it in different ways. With color our brain tells us where to look. With black and white it’s more of a discovery.”
Her drawing and VJing led to designing shoes for Adidas and VJing at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. She was a visiting scholar in social computing at MIT’s Media Lab in 2014 and ’15. In 2016, she VJed for a live set by rapper Kendrick Lamar in a dome on the beach at Art Basel Miami. (“He’s super chill,” she says. “Obviously hardworking, humble. His whole crew is really nice. Somebody who is obsessed with and doing what they love.”)
Last year she had a solo show at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo and she launched a line of sunglasses through Max Mara. In February, she’s scheduled to launch a line of shoes, apparel and accessories through Puma.
“It doesn’t matter if I’m working with a scientist or a researcher or a French fashion show or doing a museum show,” Martin says. “To me, it’s all my art.”
Her Northeastern show includes black marker drawings running across a rainbow of hues sprayed along eight canvases. Color isn’t exactly new to her work. In the United States, she’s known for her black and white drawings, but she says she worked a lot in color when she lived in Tokyo. The inspiration for adding color again, she says, is “It’s a new year, new beginnings. Being in Jersey City, they have these amazing sunsets.”
At the bottom of one canvas, she’s written, “Don’t hide in the corners.”
“A lot of us hide ourselves,” she says. “We hide our true selves. We don’t put ourselves out of the corner because it’s vulnerable, it’s intimidating. It’s kind of a note to self to continue to push, to continue to challenge, to continue to be yourself.”
What is her own answer to “Who are you” and “Are You You”?
“I’m trying to figure it out,” Martin says. “That’s the journey.”
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