LONG BEACH, CA.- For his most ambitious artwork to date, Narsiso Martinez has made a painting that looks like an enormous dollar bill issued by an imaginary country that actually values its working class. Filling most of a wall of his current show at the Museum of Latin American Art, it has roughly the same dimensions as U.S. paper currency and some of the same symbols, with decorative medallions in the corners and a framed portrait in the center.

Only the subject of this portrait is not an American founding father but a hero of another kind: a California farmworker from Mexico, shown in semi-profile with her thick, black hair tied back and her gaze strong and direct. At either side are farmworkers in full gear: masks to protect them from pesticides, hats to shield them from the sun, and goggles or sunglasses for both.

Other scenes complete the artwork, which draws on the Mexican muralist tradition in its narrative scope and celebration of physical labor and on dada collage and assemblage in its use of found objects. The entire painting, done in gouache, ink, charcoal and gold leaf, was made not on canvas but on flattened produce boxes — the kind used for oranges, strawberries, watermelons and the like — which come with punchy corporate logos and sunny illustrations that add color to the scene. The produce boxes point to the big business of American agriculture, which depends so heavily on — and often exploits — undocumented Mexican immigrants who have little leverage when the work is dangerous or wages too low.

Martinez, 45, who was born in Mexico and lives in Long Beach, titled his artwork “Legal Tender.” “I liked the word ‘tender’ as a reminder that people can be fragile, people can be hurt,” the artist said at his studio in Long Beach, a small, street-level space between a bodega and a liquor store. “I also wanted to ask questions about what it means to be legal. Is your food illegal if it’s picked by someone who is so-called illegal?” He said the central figure in “Legal Tender” is based on an undocumented California farmworker from Guerrero, Mexico, whom he met and photographed — and paid for her time.

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Gilbert Vicario, the chief curator of the Pérez Art Museum in Miami and a guest curator who included Martinez in the new Orange County Biennial, “Pacific Gold,” said the artist “is meeting the current moment — with our desire for inclusivity and diversity — head-on.”

He sees Martinez as part of a new generation of Chicano artists responding to the issue of cultural invisibility. “It’s a common refrain in Chicanx art that we are invisible as a community, certainly with little representation in Hollywood,” said Vicario, who said he was raised in San Diego by Mexican parents.

“What interests me about Narsiso is how he is making visible a group of people who have been overlooked or behind the scenes in the agricultural economy,” Vicario said.

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Gabriela Urtiaga, the curator who organized the Martinez show, “Rethinking Essential,” for the Museum of Latin American Art, praised the sensitivity of his portraits in the exhibition, which also include delicate black-and-white “Ghost Portrait” prints he made on transparency paper. “He treats the people he depicts with such gratitude and respect,” she said, noting that his rendering of their eyes is especially expressive, communicating “pain and loss but also hopefulness.”

These portraits of farmworkers are also self-portraits, in a sense: Martinez worked the fields himself, on and off for nearly a decade, before landing solo shows at the Los Angeles gallery Charlie James and at local museums. He picked asparagus, cherries and apples in eastern Washington to pay his way through art school.

Born in 1977, Martinez was raised in Santa Cruz Papalutla, 16 miles from Oaxaca “but more than an hour away when I was growing up because there were no roads,” said the artist, who hung a knockoff van Gogh with farmworkers asleep in a field on the studio wall behind him.

He is one of six siblings; his family grew its own food, including corn, beans and squash, on a small plot of land. He liked sketching comical figures and learned to weld from his father, a musician who also had a metal shop.




When he was 20, he moved to Los Angeles, where a much-older brother lived. He took classes to learn English and earned his GED at age 29 and an associate degree from Los Angeles City College when he was 32. Along the way, he held a mix of jobs, working at a carwash or loading trucks for a produce warehouse, where one of his tasks involved sorting fruit.

It was his first glimpse of big agribusiness, and its wastefulness, up close. “It was horrible because there was a lot of produce thrown out that they could have donated — potatoes, tomatoes, limes,” he said. “Sometimes there were entire pallets full of boxes that ended up in the trash.”

By that time, he knew that he wanted to study art and transferred to California State University, Long Beach, where he ultimately earned his Master of Fine Arts in 2018. But it wasn’t easy. By the end of his first undergraduate semester, he had run out of money. He took his other brother up on an invitation to join them picking crops in eastern Washington. “They were like: Come to the fields and you can save all your money. We’ll give you a place to stay and we’ll feed you,” he said.

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He started by picking asparagus. “It was backbreaking work because we bent over all day, and I was not very good at the beginning. Also I was afraid of the knife. We had to hold a bundle in one hand and use a long knife in the other to at one stroke make it all the same length. We started working at midnight or 1 a.m. with a miner’s lamp on our hats. So it was dark and kind of scary at first.” The pace was also relentless, as captured in his video in the Long Beach show where farmworkers move so quickly it looks like the video was sped up.

He went back to the fields over summers and for three years straight before graduate school, often taking his sketchbook to work. Sometimes he would use the short breaks to make a quick sketch of the landscape or of people resting or lying on the ground. Or at night he would make portraits on whatever material was at hand, whether a cheap canvas or plain cardboard.

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About halfway through his MFA program, he stumbled across a new medium that would give him a powerful way of exploring class conflict. At a Costco near Los Angeles on a pizza run, he noticed a purple and green box from the company One Banana in a big pile and asked to take it home. After flattening the box, he left the ultra-vivid corporate logos and illustrations intact, drawing over them the figure of a man who carries a huge load of bananas on his head and grimaces slightly under the weight.

“My earlier paintings brought together scenes of the very rich and the very poor,” Martinez said, referring to one showing a lavish dinner party with a chandelier in the foreground, set against farmworkers in the background. “But they were too literal. Instead of making so much noise, sometimes it’s important to have a conversation.”

In addition to large compositions such as “Legal Tender,” he has stacked and altered boxes to create mixed-media sculptures. The Orange County biennial curators took their exhibition’s title “Pacific Gold” from one of Martinez’s sculptures, which contains a russet potato box with that name.

“The Pacific Gold logo made me think about the history of California and all the beautiful things about the Golden State,” Martinez said, adding, “and the ugly history we don’t speak about as much.”

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‘Rethinking Essential’

Through Jan. 8 at the Museum of Latin American Art, 628 Alamitos Ave., Long Beach, Calif., 562-437-1689, molaa.org.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.