A Brooklyn-based multi-disciplinary artist, Mildred Beltré Martinez has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the SCAD Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, and the Santa Fe Art Institute. Her work is in the collections of the University of Delaware, the Walker Art Center, Proyecto’ ace in Buenos Aires, and many others. She leads the University of Vermont’s Arts in Action program, a semester-long art and activism experience based in New York City. She is the co-founder with Oasa DuVerney of The Brooklyn Hi-Art Machine, a collaborative public art project. She holds M.A. and M.F.A. degrees in printmaking from the University of Iowa, and a B.A. in studio art and anthropology from Carleton College.

BMAC spoke with Beltré Martinez about “Ancestry.comb,” a mixed media work on view through June 12, 2022, in the exhibit Mildred Beltré Martinez: Between Starshine and Clay.

Ancestry.comb (2021)
human hair, cotton, wool
curtain: 8 x 20 inches, 2 rugs: 24 x 24 inches each

This piece was one that I thought about making for a long time. It took me years to complete, because the curtain is made out of hair, and collecting that hair took a long time. A lot of it is my own hair that I was collecting through the years. The title of the piece, however, “Ancestry.comb,” came very quickly, unlike everything else. My sisters had recently done Ancestry.com, so it was a riff on that. I thought it was funny.

In my initial thinking, I wanted it to be like a beaded curtain, like the one my grandmother had in her house. I still think about walking through that curtain at her house and what it felt and sounded like. I wanted this curtain to be something people would have to walk through—and I also understood that that would be a little bit of a confrontational gesture. It’s not socially acceptable to try to make someone walk through people’s shed hair. That was my dream, but I knew that that wasn't what I was going to do with it.

I wanted the curtain to be roughly the width of a body and taller than a person, and to be something that you would stand in front of, if not walk through. As the piece came together, I thought about it in two ways. One is that people could stand on either side of it and have an experience mediated through this curtain of hair. And the other way is that it could be like a mirror, seeing what’s “reflected” back at you. The addition of the two floor pieces is a way to mediate and regulate people's experience with the curtain, to position the viewer. The text on those pieces, “WE ALREADY ARE,” comes from the sense that the struggle for social justice isn’t about asking to be granted something that we lack. It's actually about claiming and asserting our already existing humanity. It’s not asking for humanity—we already have that—but rather stating, “Let me keep that.”

I’m already thinking about ways I could expand on the hair curtain. I would love to see it installed in a really tall room and extend it further. I like the idea of it ascending or descending from a distance. It would still be roughly the width of my shoulders, but taller.

I am not an artist that works on individual pieces. I'm always thinking about the interaction of the work, and I'm always thinking about the energy that all the work together can generate in the space. For this installation I was really interested in flow—places where you move quickly, places where you might stop for a little bit, how your eye moves around and through the space. The strips of color that are on the floor and on the wall are meant to move you through the space. I wanted there to be a certain energy. There’s a sense of something evolving. Sometimes I want a sense of things not being complete. So there’s always a little bit of an ellipse at the end… I hope the work complicates our understandings of identities.

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Learn more about the exhibit: Mildred Beltré Martinez: Between Starshine and Clay.
Virtual tour
Installation shots