Garments gathered from the street are placed back into circulation as luxury objects, is a monumental project by artist Gabriel Martinez, comprised of over a hundred individual quilt paintings. Each work in the series is sewn by hand, without the use of a sewing machine, from fragments of fabric found in the streets during the artist’s travels across Houston. They situate Martinez as one body among many involved in the manipulation of the material. The paintings record the traces of global capital, evoking those who dyed and printed the fabric, those who assembled the garments, the people who wore and lost them, as well as the artist who places them back into circulation as luxury objects. They serve as an invitation for the viewer to consider not only their formal composition and the laborious nature of their production but also the disjunctive economies that enable such value shifts.
Philip Kelleher-Rios’ essay “Sensory Contact: Gabriel Martinez’s Hand-Stitched Paintings” offers an intimate study of the project, grounding the work in the material histories of global textile labor while simultaneously tracing how Martinez’s compositions resonate with the geometric experimentation of mid-century Latin American abstraction. By following Martinez’s process of collecting, washing, cutting, and assembling street-found garments, the essay reveals how embodied movement through the city connects to broader systems of production and exchange. It invites readers to engage both the formal clarity and the tactile complexity of these works, opening space to reflect on how discarded materials accrue new meaning through attentive and transformative acts of making.
