BRATTLEBORO — The title of Mildred Beltré Martinez's Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC) exhibit, “Between Starshine and Clay,” is drawn from a poem by Lucille Clifton: “born in babylon / both nonwhite and woman / what did i see to be except myself? / i made it up / here on this bridge between / starshine and clay.”
Like the poem, the exhibition on view through June 12 explores issues of identity.
“Clifton is celebrating that for Black women, the formation of self is an act of resistance and resilience,” Beltré Martinez said in a news release. “In my practice, I create drawings, textiles, and installations that address feeling, desire, and the weight of expectation in order to express a shifting sense of self that speaks to the complexity of a Black, ethnic, gendered experience.”
A Brooklyn-based, multidisciplinary artist, Beltré Martinez has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including at the SCAD Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, and the Santa Fe Art Institute. She leads the University of Vermont's Arts in Action program, a semester-long art and activism experience based in New York City.
Her work is in the collections of the University of Delaware, the Walker Art Center, Proyecto'ace in Buenos Aires, and many others. She is the co-founder with Oasa DuVerney of The Brooklyn Hi-Art Machine, a collaborative public art project. She holds master's and Master of Fine Arts degrees in printmaking from the University of Iowa and a bachelor's in studio art and anthropology from Carleton College.
“Between Starshine and Clay” includes works from two ongoing series by Beltré Martinez, “Skin in the Game” and “Slogans for the Revolution That Never Was.”
The BMAC exhibit features three self-portraits from “Skin in the Game,” two of which have as their base a wash of walnut ink that the artist made after gathering walnuts, often with her sister. BMAC Curator Emerita Mara Williams describes the third portrait as “an ebullient celebration of color and clarity, crisply set against a white ground.”
In a statement accompanying the exhibit, Beltré Martinez described “Skin in the Game” as posing several questions: “What am I willing to put on the line for my beliefs, and how do I move toward or away from that commitment to social change and social justice? In what ways do I make myself vulnerable and where do I retreat?”
“Slogans for the Revolution That Never Was” is an ongoing text-based series in which the text is obscured, difficult to read, or created via a labor-intensive process such as cross-stitch. “This gesture undercuts the idea of the 'slogan,' which is meant to be clear, declarative, and easily taken, replacing it with something that requires a closer reading,” Beltré Martinez said.