Joe Martinez
Performance
Palmdale, CA
Joe Martinez is the recipient of the Waud Fellowship for Formerly Incarcerated Artists.
Joe E Martinez (He/Him; They/Them) is an emerging inter-disciplinary Queer Artist of Color, Scholar, and Educator. He was born in Sylmar, California, and has lived in the San Fernando Valley and Antelope Valley (Los Angeles) all his life. They live with their Mom (born in Mexico), brother, and 3 sisters (born in the U.S.). Their father lives in Santa Fe, Mexico, near the San Ysidro Border. Joe began their journey into higher education as an Educational Opportunity Program student (2009) at California State University, Northridge. The program’s Ethnic Studies and Mentoring curriculum influenced their decision to change their Undergraduate Major from Theater to Pan African Studies (2014). They would spend a great deal of their time studying their favorite writers like Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, and began writing creative non-fiction. Later, they earned their Master of Arts in Communication Studies with an emphasis in Performance, Language, and Cultural Studies, where they learned to merge their passion for theater, teaching, and social justice. As a graduate student, they began creating auto-ethnographic performance with CSUN’s Performance Ensemble Creatives for Social Justice. These performances narrated personal struggles around unfolding and intersecting identities. Decolonizing white, cis-gendered, heteronormative scripts, they also began to dig up their roots in the spiritual arts as a “Queer Chicano.” Soon after, these narrations took the form of installation art pieces that also told stories around their families’ local migrations and uprooting due to their father’s chemical dependency and deportation. Joe began using their performance art to promote healing via storytelling and medicinal smudging.
After graduating, Joe became incarcerated at Los Angeles Men’s Central Jail, where they were housed in protective custody, also known as the “GBT Dorms.” Here, they proactively built community and participated in the dorm’s Jailhouse Ballroom and Talent shows, finding a meaningful way to think through and share not only the struggles with incarceration, mental health, and addiction, but also the joy they found in spite of it all. Joe’s artwork replicates the art craftsmanship and textiles that inhabited the jailhouse, such as fashion design with bedsheets, trash bags, and food-coloring dyes. Joe’s experience with incarceration/re-entry and addiction/recovery in “A Queer Jail Time” has prompted their efforts to create artwork that centers Transformative Justice, Harm-Reduction, Mutual Aid, and Abolition. After incarceration, Joe enrolled in Intensive Outpatient Programs for Substance Use Disorder and Residential Bridge Housing in Altadena and Pasadena. These programs were Queer and Trans centered. Joe continued their healing journey with other peers, and they also began showcasing performance scripts that were written in the jailhouse. Critically and aesthetically, they continued to experiment with staging, costuming, mask-making, movement, music, and prose that brought to life the often complex emotions, thoughts, and actions of Queer and Trans people who survive (and at times don’t survive) incarceration and addiction. They are self-taught in Digital Graphic Art and Digital Photography and have worked with other re-entry and recovery programs such as Project Rebound @CSUN and The Social Impact Center, which has provided generous platforms to showcase posters of their community members. Joe’s stories center critical questions around institutional and interpersonal struggles for liberation and decolonized healing that are often haunted by colonial frameworks of individualistic, disciplinary, and punitive programming. Joe’s artwork labors in the efforts to build Queer Abolitionist Worlds.
They currently work as a part-time faculty member in the Queer Studies Program at CSUN and have hopes to continue to earn their Ph.D. In Performance Studies. Joe would love to open up an Abolitionist Community Theater.