“I always thought being an artist,” Shantell Martin told me recently in her LA studio, “allowed you to do anything you want. It's a freedom to create whatever you want, wherever you want, whenever you want.”

Shantell Martin by Matt Doyle

That is certainly true for Martin whose life and career has never followed a straight line. Martin has found expression in a multiplicity of mediums, materials, venues, and in artistic collaborations and outlets all over the globe.

Martin’s work is improvised, a spontaneous black marker line that travels from the decorative to the meaningful, that incorporates words that challenge and strive to achieve self-definition and healing such as her series installed in New York’s Calatrava World Trade Center Oculus Transit Station that asked, “WHO ARE YOU” and answered, “YOU ARE YOU” adding the question, “ARE YOU YOU.”

Martin’s work has been exhibited at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the Denver Art Museum, The Brooklyn Museum as well as galleries all over the US and all over the world. She has taught at New York University, at MIT’s Media Lab, and at Columbia’s Brown Institute of Media Innovation.

Shantell Martin installation at NYC World Trade Center Oculus

In the last decade, Martin has done collaborations with Kendrick Lamar in Miami 2017; Max Mara Eyeglass frames in 2017; a 2014 collaboration with Kelly Wearstler on fabric, home décor objects, totes, clothing and furniture; a 2017 collaboration with Momentum Textiles of four intricately women patterns in 30 colors that are in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian; a 2018 collection for Puma worldwide; an installation for Tiffany & Co., in Milan 2018; a 2021 collaboration with Adidas at the NYC MakerLab; a 2021 collaboration with The North Face (could be my favorite); and a 2022 home products line with Hoek. Martin even did a collaboration with her own grandmother Dot Martin of embroidered messages, which was eventually exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum.

In the performance of her art, Martin has also found the inspiration to choreograph works for the Boston Ballet and done the backdrops for works at the New York City Ballet. Recently, she has turned to making music and vocalizing as part of experiential events. It would be easy to see in her lines the long path she has taken from her childhood but speaking with Martin one gets the impression that she has always been the artist and person present today.

“I have learned to embrace my multivalent perspectives and double consciousness and to see strength and exalt in my personal and cultural in-betweenness…. My preference of working in black and white is an apt metaphor of my own existence.”

Martin grew up in Southeast London, raised by a single mother and stepdad, living in a low-income housing project with her half-siblings. Which might have been tough enough, but there was this added element: Martin was brown skinned with an Afro, a mixed-race child, while her siblings, mother, stepdad and everyone else in the housing complex was white.

“I experienced racism every time I left my house,” Martin recalled. However, because she was, in her own words, “A weirdo kid,” Martin says there was a silver lining: “I didn’t have the pressure to fit in like everyone else… And that gave me a little bit of freedom.”

Looking back at her childhood, Martin reflects that “when you have no control over your day, over your week, or over your future, you have to find some sense of control in something.” Martin explains: “For me there were two things: I became insanely organized… I controlled everything. I collected posters, I collected stamps. I collected plastic bags, and I would constantly organize them to make sure they were in perfect order,” Martin said. Her other coping mechanism was to write and draw, “I didn’t know it was Art. I just knew that if I wrote or drew, it made me feel better.” Martin makes the point that drawing is something that is available to every child. “Drawing is so accessible; I didn’t have to discover it. It was a tool that was already there.”

Back then Martin was more interested in running than art. “I was the fastest girl in the school, I ran for a local team in the 200 meters.” Martin assumed she would go on to study sports science at university, but after a few weeks of prepping for exams in Physics, she decided to drop the class in favor of an Art course which she assumed would be easy. Which it was, for her. She did well on her A level Art Exams, but her teacher discouraged her from applying to Art school convinced she wouldn’t get in.

Undaunted, Martin applied and was accepted to Campbell College for Arts for a one-year foundation course which is a feeder route to more prestigious Art Schools.

At Campbell, for the first time, Martin found herself among her people. “It was such a weird eclectic group of weirdos.” She said, adding, “Finally, the weirdos were all in one place … and they weren’t getting beaten up.” Martin excelled at Campbell and was accepted to the prestigious Central St. Martins, England’s premier school for Art & Design, with students following courses in studio art, or fashion, or industrial design. Among the myriad graduates of Central St. Martins are George & George, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Jarvis Cocker, P J Harvey, John Galliano, Stella McCartney, Alexander McQueen.

At that moment (2000-2003) Central St Martins was still in an old building that they were in the process of selling. Martin specialized in graphic design and communication. Students in other disciplines such as fashion, jewelry and product designers were in a different building. Even the courses at St. Martins were not traditional art or design courses. “What we did learn is how to talk to people,” Martin said, “how to talk about our work, you know, how to be conceptual, how to have ideas or expand on ideas.”

In 2000, Martin traveled for the first time to Japan, which she found “incredibly refreshing.” In England, she explained, the minute you open your mouth, people are making judgements about your upbringing, social class, education – all based on your accent and dialect. Whereas in Japan – you are either Japanese or you are a foreigner. In Japan, Martin was an outsider, but she found comfort in that “Because I wasn’t trying to be anything else.” In England, the country she was born in, where her grandfather fought in the war, people were always treating her like she wasn’t from there. In Japan there was no need to try to fit in. “That was liberating.”

So, after graduating St. Martins in 2003, Martin moved to Japan. In Tokyo, Martin, like many young people there, found herself going out dancing in clubs where giant visuals were being projected on the walls. Martin had the idea that she could project on the club’s walls drawings that she made live while playing music. By doing so, she became a popular Tokyo VJ (Video Disk Jockey – a thing at the time in Tokyo), playing one night at some underground DIY space and the next for five thousand people in a techno club with the highest quality equipment and sound. As a foreigner in Japan, she became part of a community of expats all of whom sought each other out in the nascent days of Facebook and MySpace.

Martins, who had initially planned to spend a year in Japan, ended up staying there for almost five years. She built a large fanbase as a VJ and a community of expats. She decided to leave when the social insulation of being a foreigner began to dissolve and she became aware of the darker aspects of Japanese society. She knew that if she wanted to continue to love Japan and the experience she had there, she would have to leave.

Martins ended up in New York (She first visited in 2008 and moved there in 2009), which she now says, with a laugh, was “probably one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made.” Martin had built a life in Tokyo, a living, a fanbase for her work, a community. In New York, she had none of those. “When you move to New York, no one cares who you are.” There was no such thing as being a VJ in New York clubs. She thought of herself as an artist, but no galleries were interested in her. “Everyone’s trying to be an artist,” was what she heard repeatedly in New York.

Shantell Martin installation for The May Room on Governors Island.

“I was starting all over again,” Martin recalled. “That was the tough thing.” Martin slept on couches “for like two years.” After months of wishing her Japanese fanbase were in New York, or that her Tokyo friends were there or that she had money, a patron, or a gallery, Martin decided she needed to make her own opportunities.

“I was like, okay, what do I have?” Martin said. “I have this experience and skillset from Japan. I have some friends. So let me like try and make the most of that.” She began to ask friends who had a space if she could do a show there. Eventually a friend offered up a little space in Williamsburg (Brooklyn) where Martin started to do these evenings where she invited a band to play while she drew her projections, like she had done in Japan, making line drawings that took on a life of their own. Word spread and more people started to come. It wasn’t billed as art, or a performance, but just part of the show and the experience.

There was no monetization. But then, in February 2010, someone who came to one evening turned out to work at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He contacted Martin and hired her for a friends and family event in the Museum’s large atrium. A few weeks later she got a call from the TV show Gossip Girl saying they were shooting a party scene and wanted her to make a cameo drawing her projections. That ran two months later. The following year she did an event for the Museum of the Moving Image in NY and events and conferences in Florida, England, and St. Petersburg, Russia.

By 2012, it was now four years since she’d first arrived in New York and two years since the MoMa event. Martin had rented a room in a brownstone in BedStuy where the owners asked her to feel free to draw on the walls. So, she did: On the walls and on the ceiling as well. Martin shared pictures of her room on Facebook and soon got a call from an editor at the New York Times asking if they could feature her room in the Home section. That article, “A Very Fine Line” by Liz Arnold, ended up being the front page of the Home & Garden section (Section D of the paper) on May 23, 2012, and then jumped to the inside. Suddenly, Martin was an overnight success.

Shantell Martin poses in her Max Mara sunglasses in front of her work 2017, Paris, France. (Photo ... [+] by Bertrand Rindoff Petroff/Getty Images for Max Mara)

The New York Times “made a world of difference,” Martin said. In the decade since, her projects have been many and varied. There have been museum and gallery shows in Brooklyn, Tokyo, Boston, Toronto, on Governor’s Island, among others. Major brand collaborations with Tiffany & Co, Flos, Kelly Wearstler, Vitra, Puma Select, Jose Cuervo/1800, Max Mara, Kendrick Lamar, Martone Cycling, WME IMG/New York Fashion Week, Interview Magazine, Saks Fifth Avenue, Canada, AmFAR, RED, United Arrows, Warby Parker, Amex, KCA Blackball.

Yet, in each work, and in each collaboration, the distinctiveness of Martin’s work – her line – remains recognizable. Martin explained that she has learned over time that if she approaches an institution or a brand about doing a work, it rarely works out. By contrast, saying no to work, Martin discovered, “puts you on the path where you are just saying yes to the things you want to do.”

Or put another way, “I’m gonna draw what I wanna draw,” Martin said.

“I literally go with the flow on the journey where the ink pen takes me,” Martin said in an artist’s statement. “I am as surprised by the outcome as the viewer.” In our conversation, I remarked that while that may be true, it doesn’t account for her confidence, evident in her ability and in her work. Martin agrees: “It's all confidence. It's like a hundred percent confidence.”

Consistently, Martin has placed herself in situations where she is an outsider – outside of her comfort zone, outside of her experience or knowledge of specific forms – as a visual artist, as a performance artist, as a choreographer, as a product designer, decorator, whatever reductive terms one chooses that do not contain Martin’s multitudes. In each instance, she makes the environment and the world and one’s experience of it, her own.

Martin agrees. As she told me: “I'm always like an outsider on the inside.”