about the artist

As a queer, female American artist, my figurative work asserts identity as both a site of resistance and a stage for transformation. Through painting and drawing, I create enigmatic characters who confront the viewer with a quiet but insistent presence. Rooted in traditional media but subversive in intent, these characters embody layered political and historical narratives shaped by gender nonconformity, queerness, and the deeply politicized nature of simply existing in a body that challenges norms.

I draw from history, feminist and queer theory, the aesthetics of protest, media and advertising, as well as the coded language of allegory and design. My figures inhabit a kind of suspended performance of a stillness that disrupts. They carry the weight of surveillance, erasure, defiance. They are archetypes fractured by lived experience, pieced back together in ways that speak to the resilience and complexity of queer identity.

In this liminal space between silence and assertion, I aim to expose the fault lines of power, beauty, and representation. My work invites viewers to look again, not just at the figures, but at the systems that define and constrain them. Every character I render becomes an invitation to question: who gets to be seen and on whose terms?

Poster design and art by CL Martin for 2023 solo show
A piece in a public art installation at Art Basel Miami 2020; curated by Save Art Space and muralist NM Salgar. "Propaganda", mixed media on paper, 2020

CL Martin is a queer, figurative artist working in traditional media. She creates mysterious characters who exude their own distinct identities in a kind of still performance, imbued with diverse influences from history, allegory, design, psychology and social constructs. She has studied art all her life and received a BFA in Painting from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. In 2007, she received an Artist Initiative Grant from the MN State Arts Board and the National Endowment for The Arts. She has exhibited internationally from Italy to New York and her work resides in private collections across the globe.