Homegrown
Homegrown
Curated by Patrick Martinez
969 Chung King Road
february 20 - April 11, 2026
OPENING RECEPTION: friday February 20, 5-8pm
SHOW CATALOG (PDF)
Charlie James Gallery is proud to present Homegrown, an exhibition curated by Patrick Martinez of artworks by members of his family, many of whom were practicing artists. The shows features works by Eliseo Martinez, Ed Martinez, Daniel Martinez, Ismael Martinez, Ruben Martinez, Rayvan Martinez, Chris Martinez and Patrick Martinez.
In gathering these works together for the first time, Martinez found an unexpected stylistic continuity running up his family tree: graphic works by Patrick’s cousin Rayvan Valdez Martinez (Gonzales), an activist, artist, designer, and silkscreen printer who worked at "La Raza Silkscreen/Graphic Center" from 1977 to 1982, bear resemblance to the crisp linework of Martinez’s Pee Chee folder series of prints and drawings or the more recent Home Depot drawings. Elsewhere, photographs by his father and sculptures by his grandfather evince sustained and simultaneous dedication to craft and an interest in the Los Angeles landscape over decades of family history.
Homegrown runs concurrently with Patrick Martinez: Left in Ruins, an exhibition of new paintings, drawings, sculptures, and neons by the Los Angeles artist, his fourth with the gallery. The works in this exhibition were created over the last two years and represent the culmination of the artist’s formal experimentation and thematic distillation reaching back nearly a decade. Martinez works at the scale of the city, using the Los Angeles landscape as material and medium. His interest falls equally on the city’s edenic flora and its ubiquitous signage; its promise of paradise and its oft-crumbling reality. This layered consideration of Los Angeles as subject manifests in works that encompass histories of migration and mark-making, architecture and activism, that are immediately familiar yet exhilaratingly original. Concurrently with this exhibition, Martinez will present a site-specific installation at Frieze Los Angeles, where six neon works will be installed in the fair’s entrance hall that directly and emphatically confront the recent kidnappings by ICE agents across the country.
