Shantell Martin Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1980 -

Shantell Martin (born October 1, 1980) is a British visual artist best known for her large scale, black-and-white drawings. She performs many of her drawings for a live audience. Born in Thamesmead, London, Martin lives and works in New York. Along with exhibitions and commission for museums and galleries, Martin frequently works on international commercial projects, both private and public.

Martin was born in East London and studied at Bexleyheath School in South East London. After a year at Camberwell College of Arts, she was admitted to Central Saint Martin's College of Art and Design in London. She graduated with honours in 2003.

After graduation, she lived in Japan where she first experimented with live performance art as a visual jockey. From 2006 to 2009, Martin developed her drawing skills through "liveography" — the process of projecting live drawings to sound, music or other experience. She performed at music concerts, design festivals and in public spaces internationally.

In 2008, Martin moved to New York. This period marked the next phase of her career, where she began to focus primarily on physical drawing.

Her first solo exhibition, Continuous Line, was held at Black and White Gallery in Williamsburg, New York, and her first solo museum show, ARE YOU YOU, opened at The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts in Brooklyn. This was followed by Black and White, a collaboration in embroidery with her grandmother, as a part of the Brooklyn Museum group show, Crossing Brooklyn: Art from Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Beyond, in 2015. In New York City, she has exhibited at Studio 301, Milk Gallery, Museum of the Moving Image and 3 Howard Street. She has also exhibited at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York.

She staged a live drawing installation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for a private event.

Martin has had residencies at 92nd Street Y's Milton J. Weill Art Gallery, The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas (in collaboration with Art Production Fund), Summit Series in Utah, Clark College in Washington and Autodesk in San Francisco.

Since 2013, Martin has been an adjunct assistant professor at NYU Tisch School of the Arts where she teaches the course "Drawing on Everything". Martin was previously a visiting scholar and research affiliate at MIT Media Lab, Social Computing group (2011–2017). She was a 2018-2019 advisory board member for the Climate Museum in New York and an ambassador for the Global Poverty Project. In 2014, she participated in Sundance Institute's New Frontier. She is also a fellow at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia University.

In addition to contributing to a body of work, Martin is a public figure. In 2012, her Bedford-Stuyvesant bedroom and artwork were featured in the New York Times' Home and Garden Section. Her personal style has been documented in Vogue, and the The New Yorker created a short video on her creative process in 2014, called "Follow the Pen".

In 2019, Martin was featured in an exhibition at the Denver Art Museum, which showed her iconic black-and-white drawings on the museum's walls, floors and ceilings all over the building. The exhibition explored the concepts of intersectionality, identity and play. Martin's drawings in the museum were swapped in and out throughout the length of the exhibition, making it fluid and different on each visit.
Collaborations

In 2016, Martin collaborated with Kendrick Lamar for a 75-minute performance at Art Basel in Miami. She worked with Puma for three separate collaborations, PUMA x SHANTELL MARTIN. In 2018, for her third collaboration, Puma staged a pop-up on Canal Street in New York City. She has also collaborated with Tiffany & Co., Vespa and 1800 Tequila, as part of the tequila company's "Essential Artists" series. For Kelly Wearstler, she created a mural for the Melrose Avenue boutique and a line of clothing and furniture.