This article is part of our Design special section about innovative surfaces in architecture, interiors and products.
For the artist Shantell Martin, every surface has a story. It is just a matter of figuring out how to tell it best.
When she is commissioned to create one of her trademark line drawings on a wall or a ceiling — or on a sidewalk, storefront, museum gallery or the set of a live performance — she digs into the history of the place, into its role in the present and what it might be in the future. She is a wall whisperer, listening and interpreting.
“In a way, the artwork already exists there,” said Ms. Martin, whose latest show featuring a wall mural and works on paper is scheduled to run through April 17 at Vardan Gallery in Los Angeles. “And it’s my job to kind of go away and meditate, or daydream, or imagine how to bring it out so that we can all see it.”
Ms. Martin’s works can be deceptively simple. She makes lines, most often in the color black, applied to surfaces that have been painted white, that can be dismissed as simple squiggles, as dashes and dots rendered at random. But it is not like that. Her lines are narratives written in codes on the edges of buildings and other spaces that are meant to help viewers get a deeper sense of where they are at the moment.
Sometimes, the lines are connected into shapes, like triangles or circles, and often they form into faces, as with her 2017 “Dance Everyday,” a 200-foot-long outdoor mural that served as a group portrait of the residents in Buffalo’s economically challenged Northland Corridor neighborhood.
Or they come together as actual words that can be read like signs or banners. One piece, set up at the Oculus transportation hub at the World Trade Center in Manhattan, in 2019, projected the three words “Who,” “Are” and “You” in different configurations across 21 video screens. The works are meant to be experienced in the abstract instead of deciphered literally.
The artist, who is 43, is known equally for her public projects, done in collaboration with nonprofit arts groups, and for more commercial endeavors that help her pay her bills. She has applied her technique to a concrete plaza in Denver, a basketball court in Rockaway Beach in Queens and along construction barriers set up around Thamesmead, the low-income public-housing project in southeast London where she grew up before getting an art degree from Central Saint Martins in 2003 and eventually relocating to the United States.
It was that upbringing, she said, in a neighborhood with limited economic and social opportunities, that inspired — or compelled — her to start making marks. It was a way of enlarging her presence in the world. She never stopped.
“I grew up in an environment that I didn’t really have any control over. And so drawing was a way that, initially, I could just get my anger out, and my frustrations out, not knowing that it was art or anything like that,” she said.
Besides being an artist who has forged a connection to the world of design, Ms. Martin is an entrepreneur who clearly understands the value of her product. Her website has a shop that sells T-shirts, mugs and luggage tags, and her drawings can be seen in the Saraghina pizzeria in Brooklyn, in advertisements for The North Face clothing brand, and once in a collaborative performance with the musical artist Kendrick Lamar during the 2016 Art Basel Miami fair that was sponsored by American Express.
She has incorporated a variety of job descriptions — she designed eyeglasses for the fashion brand Max Mara, published a book of her drawings, taught at both New York University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology and even choreographed a piece for the Boston Ballet, for which she also designed the sets — into a career that is hard to put into any neat category.
In one sense, she is a graffiti artist making her signature moves in large public spaces. Ms. Martin has been a regular at the Digital Graffiti Festival in Alys Beach on Florida’s Gulf Coast.
At the same time, her work comes off as polished, more of a personal reflection on the surrounding environment than an angry social statement.
That easy-to-like aspect has put her in demand with large institutions that support work with mass appeal. She has said there are “good intentions behind the pen.”
Still, she said, she is careful not to accept commissions that are pure marketing for corporate interests. Ms. Martin, who is Black, has taken a public stance against the exploitation of artists of color who are brought on to commercial projects to make companies appear more inclusive to their customers.
“I am someone that’s said no a lot, even perhaps to my detriment, but that means that I’m in a place where I’m able to say yes to the right things,” she said.
One of her most intricate projects was “The May Room,” which was installed on Governors Island in New York Harbor from 2019 to 2022. Ms. Martin took her pen into a former military chapel, Our Lady Star of the Sea, covering all four interior walls of the small building and drawing a black-and-white labyrinth on the floor. (She drew faces over the exterior walls, as well.)
The room became a refuge for island visitors during the pandemic and evolved into a performance space for poets and musicians.
Meredith Johnson, who directed the Governors Island curatorial team at the time, said she first encountered Ms. Martin’s art at the pizzeria in Brooklyn and appreciated the way it begged viewers to engage in a bit of “puzzle solving” trying to decode her marks.
“The interesting thing about her work is that it has two levels,” Ms. Johnson said. “It has this visceral, energizing level. But once you start spending time with it, focusing on it, it invites you to go different places.”
According to the curator, Ms. Martin researched the history of the chapel as a house of worship and then arrived with a clear plan, working start-to-finish nonstop.
“The nature of her work is that there is no erasing,” she said. “When she’s there, she’s not on her phone, she’s not doing 20 things and fitting this into her schedule. She is present and immersed in the work.”
Currently, Ms. Martin lives in Los Angeles where she has a studio and a few assistants who help her coordinate schedules and document projects, which are, for the most part, temporary. Now entering the mid-career stage, she said she does not have a specific goal for her work, though she is always eager to make her lines in new places.
“I think there is that burden sometimes of never feeling like you’ve done enough or that you are enough,” she said. “Or that burden of feeling like you’ve never reached your full potential, even though that’s something you can’t really grasp, or understand what it is.”
She is most inspired, she said, by offers to partner with other artists, musicians and dancers and she wants to build more of an infrastructure around her artistic production, perhaps creating a workshop where she might have a small staff and focus on multiple projects at once.
But she is open to how that might happen. So far, she said, “it’s been more about putting one foot in front of the other, and you are where you land, so to speak.”
The path may change but the process remains the same. “I think the ultimate core of my being is to progress and to evolve and to ask questions and to be curious,” she said. “And I’ve used the tool of the simple line to help facilitate that journey.”
