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About this Event

Join Los Angeles-based artist Patrick Martinez for an event discussing the role of art in public space as a tool for advocacy. 

In Cost of Living (2025), a series of Boston-wide installations that are part of the inaugural Boston Public Art Triennial, Patrick Martinez reflects the landscape of his hometown, Los Angeles. Influenced by murals on liquor store walls, taco truck LED signs, graffiti, and neon signs from pawn shops, money services, locksmiths, and realtors, Martinez foregrounds “the overlooked beauty found in the city.” Drawing from his conversations at Breaktime, an organization dedicated to ending the cycle of homelessness, Cost of Living illuminates their words and experiences. Martinez also created a series of signs through an exchange with Breaktime Associates, a three-year youth employment program.Cost of Living serves as a platform to raise awareness, foster empathy, and promote understanding of the challenges unhoused young people face, elevating their voices and experiences through art. 

Martinez will present his work in a lecture, followed by a conversation with Triennial artistic director Pedro Alonzo and GSD design critic Malkit Shoshan, moderated by Charles Waldheim.

Speakers

Patrick Martinez is a versatile artist known for his mixed media landscape paintings, neon sign pieces, cake paintings, and the Pee Chee series, which documents threats to black and brown youth by law enforcement. His landscape paintings blend Los Angeles surface elements to evoke place and socio-economic themes. His neon sign works remix words from literary sources, while his Cake paintings memorialize leaders, activists, and thinkers. Martinez earned his BFA from Art Center College of Design in 2005. His work has been exhibited worldwide, at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, MOCA Los Angeles, and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art and LACMA. Martinez was awarded a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency and, in 2022, a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. His neon pieces are on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and he has had solo exhibitions at the ICA San Francisco, the Dallas Contemporary, and the Tucson Museum of Art. 

Pedro H. Alonzo is an independent curator and the artistic director for the inaugural Boston Public Art Triennial, who has served as adjunct curator at Dallas Contemporary, the ICA Boston, and the Institute of Visual Arts at the University of Wisconsin. He is a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he teaches a course on curating in public spaces. Alonzo specializes in exhibitions that transcend the museum walls. In 2017, he collaborated with JR on an installation at the U.S.-Mexico border and, in 2022, he and Pedro Reyes installed Amnesia Atómica in Times Square. In 2024, Alonzo was part of the curatorial team for the Noor Riyadh Festival in Saudi Arabia. In November 2024, he produced and curated Midnight Zone, a large-scale video installation and sculptural lighthouse lens by Julian Charrière in Los Cabos, Mexico, addressing the dangers of deep-sea mining.

Malkit Shoshan is a Design Critic in Urban Planning and Design. She was the 2024-2025 Senior Loeb Scholar at Harvard GSD and a 2024 Resident at The Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. She is a designer, researcher, and writer, and founding director of the architecture think tank FAST (Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory). FAST employs research, advocacy, design, and public art to explore the complex relationships between architecture, urban planning, and human rights. In 2021, Shoshan was awarded the Silver Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale for her collaborative project Border Ecologies and the Gaza Strip: Watermelon, Sardines, Crabs, Sand, and Sediment, which is also the subject of her forthcoming book with Amir Qudaih (Mack Books, 2026). Her award-winning books on spatial equity, peace, and conflict include BLUE: The Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions (Actar, 2023), Atlas of Conflict: Israel-Palestine (Uitgeverij 010, 2010),  and Village: One Land, Two Systems. Shoshan’s research and design work has been exhibited internationally and featured in prominent newspapers, magazines, and academic journals.

Moderator

Charles Waldheim is the John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture, Director of the Office for Urbanization, and Co-Director of the Master in Design Studies program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He is an American Canadian architect and urbanist. Waldheim’s research examines the relations between landscape, ecology, and contemporary urbanism. He has authored and edited numerous books on these subjects, and his writing has been published and translated internationally. Waldheim is the recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, the Visiting Scholar Research Fellowship at the Study Centre of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Cullinan Chair at Rice University, and the Sanders Fellowship at the University of Michigan.

Cosponsor

This event is cosponsored by the Boston Public Art Triennial.

Harvard University welcomes individuals with disabilities to participate in its programs and activities. If you would like to request accommodations or have questions about the physical access provided, please contact the Public Programs Office at (617) 496-2414 or [email protected] in advance of your participation or visit. Requests for American Sign Language interpreters and/or CART providers should be made at least two weeks in advance. Please note that the University will make every effort to secure services, but that services are subject to availability.

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