Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Textiles, Installation, Painting, Tattoo
Website: christophermartin.info
Christopher Martin is a multidisciplinary artist born in Greensboro, North Carolina, and raised in the South. He studied graphic design at North Carolina A&T, where he began making the sewn banners that became the core of his practice. He moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 2010s and maintains a studio in Oakland, dividing his time between Oakland and Greensboro. Alongside his studio work he practices as a tattoo artist, and his output extends to sculpture, poetry, furniture and music production.
Martin was the first-ever artist-in-residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco in 2018, and was an SFMOMA Community in Residence in 2020. That year he also received a Bay Area Visual Artist Exhibition Production Relief Grant. In 2022 he was the inaugural artist at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, where his solo exhibition Ancient as Time opened the museum’s program. In 2023 he held residencies with The Space Program SF and at Mills College. He is represented by Hashimoto Contemporary, which presented his solo shows Homeward Bound (2021) and Void (2023). He has lectured at University College London (2018), the University of Washington (2022) and the University of Hartford (2025). His work was profiled in 2019 by KQED’s Represent series.
Martin is best known for large-scale banners and tapestries hand-cut and sewn from black and white cotton. He chose cotton deliberately for its ties to the Atlantic slave trade and the agricultural history of his North Carolina roots. The work is stark and minimal, almost always black and white. It draws on the bold, flat visual language of American traditional tattooing, including sailor flash imagery such as anchors, mermaids, swallows and the “Pharaoh’s Horses” design. He combines this with imagery from the African Diaspora and his own personal mythology. Some pieces take up loaded symbols directly, such as a Confederate flag with its stars turned upside down, and turn them toward hope and empowerment.
His exhibitions range from room-filling textile installations to fiber-based paintings on paper, ink drawings and text-based scrolls lettered in uppercase, with titles like Order of Chaos and Where Endless Begins. Across these formats, Martin layers folkloric storytelling over a direct confrontation with contemporary injustice. His aim is to build a new visual vocabulary for Black culture, and his tone moves between hopeful and melancholic.
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