Continuing CALA’s commitment to engaging audiences through dynamic virtual programming, CALA Presenta > Charlas is a series of conversations between Contemporary U.S. Latinx and Latin American artists with Executive Director and Curator Alana Hernandez. The conversation series give viewers the opportunity to remotely visit artists’ studios and hear more about their practice through informal conversations. Emphasizing CALA’s commitment to U.S. Latinx and artists in Latin America, these artist conversations explore the dynamism that exists within the Latinx and Latin American art communities. Featuring artists that span geographic locations in and outside of the United States, CALA Presenta > Charlas are presented monthly via Zoom.

Leslie Martinez was born in the Rio Grande Valley of the South Texas-Mexico border and raised in Dallas, Texas. They received a BFA from the Cooper Union in 2008 and an MFA from Yale School of Art in 2018. In the decade between they worked as a graphic designer in New York’s fashion industry which profoundly influenced new ideas around image and object construction. Martinez creates abstract paintings following a life-long interest in boundary permeation and the dualities and negations present between queerness and borders – in particular how these ideas manifest and evolve materially and gesturally. Themes of self-determination, embodiment, obfuscation, and futurity, are channeled through visual and haptic references to destruction and reconfiguration. Fabric and paper-based materials processed over the course of months and years are forged into dense and dissolving surfaces of sensorial sprawling color using non-traditional tools and techniques. With time and sensitivity, perceptual shifts occur, transforming sensations of time, scale, and space to elicit the bewildering tension between desire and refusal, legibility, and the absurd.