Delita Martin invites Islanders to visit the space between the physical world and spiritual world in her new exhibit at Featherstone Center for the Arts.

The exhibit, titled Sometimes My Blues Change Colors, opened last Sunday in Featherstone’s art barn and runs until September. Portraits made of large, layered fragments of paintings and paper cover the walls of the space.

The layers of the work represent what Ms. Martin called the veil scape.

Sometimes My Blues Change Colors exhibit opened at Featherstone last weekend. — Hailey McLaughlin

“You can walk into a room and you get this really weird feeling, or you walk into a space and it makes you feel a certain way. That to me is a spiritual space, that’s the fingerprint that has been left in that space that we are reacting to,” Ms. Martin said.

Ms. Martin added that she views prayer and mediation as ways to interact with the spiritual world.

“I had to ask myself the question, if you’re talking about the spiritual world, how do you visually describe that space. For me, it became color, it became texture it became pattern,” Ms. Martin said. “When you see the figure going in and out of the images, that’s me talking about how we marry into those spaces. You see the patterns on the skin, you see the body becoming mass, that’s the figures transitioning into its spiritual self.”

Sometimes My Blues Change Colors is the first exhibit on the Island for the decorated multi-media artist. Ms. Martin hails from Texas, where she was born and is currently based. She graduated with a bachelor of fine arts degree from Texas Southern University and earned her masters degree from Purdue University. Her work is held in the collection of a variety of museums, including the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

The exhibit continues through September 1. — Hailey McLaughlin

The Featherstone exhibit is curated by Dr. Myrtis Bedolla of Galerie Myrtis, which represents Ms. Martin.

The work in Sometimes My Blues Change Colors draws on the tradition of Cubism.

“When you think about the definition of Cubism, it’s really looking at an object or a person from multiple perspectives on one plane. When you think about my work, I’m doing the same thing,” Ms. Martin said.

For Ms. Martin, drawing on Cubism is a way of finding a new approach to a conversation she has been having through her art for a long time.

“My work at its very core is about identity, particularly the identity of Black women. There’s different types of identity. There’s spiritual identity, there’s physical identity, there’s mental perceptions of identity. This just happens to be a conversation about spiritual identity.”

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