Within the Context of Time: May-ling Martinez and Coralys Carter

Exhibition Dates: May 2–July 25, 2026

Opening Reception: Friday, May 1, 2026, 5:30–7:30 PM

Artist Talk: Friday, May 1, 5:30 PM; free with advance registration

The Athenaeum Music & Arts Library is pleased to present Within the Context of Time, a two-person exhibition bringing together new and recent works by May-ling Martinez and Coralys Carter. On view from May 2 through July 25, 2026, the exhibition explores memory, time, and family history through two distinct yet deeply resonant artistic practices. 

Neither Martinez nor Carter makes the personal explicit in their work, yet a constant current runs beneath the surface of each practice, surfacing through close attention to materials, references, and thinking. Both artists share an affinity for the power and slippage of memory,  exploring how our recollections shape us yet can also betray us, falter, or expand into something new. Family and one's own constructed narrative, the first shapers of consciousness, are strong influences in both bodies of work. 

While Martinez uses symmetry and balance to shape her assemblages and drawings, Carter plays purposefully with off-kilter constructions and hand-spun details. Both reframe everyday and found objects — hair, baskets, workaday tools, brushes, collected photos and diagrams — as totems with past lives, suffused with an eerie power. Evocative, mysterious, beautiful, and often melancholy, these two artists create frameworks from which one can begin to ponder the edges of the human experience: the vastness of time and memory alongside the mundanity of daily life. 

About the Artists 

May-ling Martinez is a Puerto Rican visual artist whose work spans mixed-media sculpture, conceptual drawings, and site-specific installations. Combining pre-fabricated objects with her own handcrafted pieces, Martinez creates art that fuses the personal and social, the everyday and the enigmatic. 

Her sculptures and works on paper act as metaphors for the human desire to understand the world around us—our personal experiences, collective connections, and the existential questions that bind us. Recent projects delve into the intersection of human nature and animism, merging scientific exploration with cultural rituals. This fusion of ancestral technologies and iconography results in works that challenge our perceptions of identity, nature, spirituality and personal needs. 

Martinez holds an MFA in Sculpture from San Diego State University and a BA in Communications from Sacred Heart University in Puerto Rico. She currently resides in San Diego, California, and has exhibited at venues including the California Center for the Arts, Quint ONE, CEART in Baja California and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (MCASD). Her latest site-specific installation is currently featured in the Mirror Mirror exhibit at San Diego International Airport. 

Coralys Carter Coralys Carter is a sculptor and weaver living in eastern Tennessee. She recently received  an MFA in Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, and is furthering her material exploration into the concept of bodies rooted in spaces and places rooted in bodies. Coralys lends flesh to memory. Through sculpture, etchings, and textiles, Carter contends with the places memories reside: in our objects, in our homes, and in ourselves.  

Carter considers time as a perpetual point of access within our bodies—inviting others to inhabit her memories with her in the present. Carter folds time, rendering it as physical as the people that slipped through the Midwest via labor, the Great Migration, and the circumstances that brought her into being.  

Recent residencies and honors include the Longenecker Roth Artist in Resident Fellow with Tanya Aguiñiga, the Black Studies Project Fellowship, the Russell Grant, Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop’s SIP Fellowship, Textile Art Center’s WIP Residency, and Processing Foundation’s Processing Fellowship. 

Exhibition underwriting is generously provided by the M & I Pfister Foundation. Additional support is provided by the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture, the Prebys Foundation, and members of the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library.

Banner image: Porcelain Country, Coralys Carter

The exhibition can be viewed in the Joseph Clayes III Gallery at the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library (1008 Wall Street, La Jolla, CA 92037) during open hours, Tuesday through Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Appointments are not required.

Selections from the Athenaeum’s Erika & Fred Torri Artists’ Books Collection

Exhibition Dates: May 2–July 25, 2026

Opening Reception: Friday, May 1, 2026, 5:30–7:30 PM

A selection of artists’ books on the environment in the Athenaeum’s Erika & Fred Torri Artists’ Books Collection will be showcased in the Max & Melissa Elliott North Reading Room.

About the Athenaeum’s Erika & Fred Torri Artists’ Books Collection

The Athenaeum’s artists’ books collection was initiated in 1991 when Joan & Irwin Jacobs Executive Director Emeritus Erika Torri received a generous donation from life member Hope Shipley with the advice “to use it for her dreams.” Artists’ books have been Torri’s passion for many years prior and it seemed a natural fit for the Athenaeum. She purchased Harry Sternberg’s limited edition A Life in Woodcuts, published by Brighton Press, and thus the collection was launched. The mission of the collection was established with a focus on regional artists and presses and on artists who emphasized art and/or music in their works. The collection has grown enormously through purchases, sponsored acquisitions, and generous donations—now numbering close to 2,200 books—and so has its reputation. It is sought out by artists, researchers and collectors and can be viewed by making an appointment with library staff.

The exhibition can be viewed in the Max & Melissa Elliott North Reading Room at the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library (1008 Wall Street, La Jolla, CA 92037) during open hours, Tuesday through Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Appointments are not required.

Annie Alarcón: Forms of Devotion

Exhibition Dates/Fechas de exposición: March 14–May 7, 2026/14 de marzo–7 de mayo de 2026

Opening Reception/Recepción de apertura: Saturday, March 14, 5–8 PM/sábado, 14 de marzo, de 5 a 8 PM

Workshop Forming Devotion: Saturday, April 18, 1:30–4:30 PM/sábado, 18 de abril, de 1:30 a 4:30 PM

In this exhibition, Annie Alarcón presents a body of ceramic sculptures that move between vessel, body, and offering. Rooted in personal writings, sketches, and ritual practice, the works trace an intimate emotional landscape shaped by memory, grief, and care. Drawing inspiration from ancient Greek perfume bottles, Alarcón treats the vessel as a keeper of the intangible, holding what is invisible, fleeting, and impossible to fully contain. 

Perfume becomes a guiding metaphor: a presence that lingers without form, deeply personal yet shared through ritual. Alarcón’s porcelain sculptures echo this tension. Their translucent surfaces are engraved with fragments of memory and emotion, bearing the marks of a process that is both deliberate and devotional. Some forms stand firmly, others appear precarious, reflecting the unstable ground of emotional experience and the effort required to tend to it. 

Influenced by the teachings of artisan mentors, Alarcón uses traditional ceramic forms as a language through which to explore contemporary inner states. Her vessels do not aim to resolve or stabilize what they hold. Instead, they offer a space for witnessing, for slowing down and acknowledging what we carry. 

Together, these works invite viewers into a quiet encounter with fragility, ritual, and the act of care itself. 

About Annie Alarcón

Annie Alarcón (born 1985, Ensenada) is a ceramic artist and cultural manager based in Tijuana, Mexico. She is the creative director of Lustre Estudio, a space dedicated to the teaching, production, and dissemination of contemporary ceramics. 

Alongside her artistic practice, Alarcón has played an active role in cultural organizing. She has produced talks, exhibitions, and workshops, and is the founder of the New Wave Ceramic Market, an initiative that has completed eight editions promoting the appreciation and circulation of ceramic work. Since 2022, she has co-created four artist residencies and curated Cerámica Bajacaliforniana (Mexicali, 2024), an exhibition highlighting regional ceramic practices. 

Alarcón’s sculptural work combines traditional ceramic techniques with experimental surface treatments and decorative processes. She was selected for the National Ceramic Award in Tlaquepaque (2022) and has participated in group exhibitions including Invisible Traditions and Vibrante at The Front Arte y Cultura (San Ysidro, 2024). 

In 2025, she took part in the Here and There artist residency, culminating in a solo exhibition at Bread & Salt in San Diego. That same year, her work was included in Dissipation Point, presented during Stockholm Craft Week in Sweden. 

Photo credit: Annie Denten

The exhibition can be viewed in the Catherine and Robert Palmer Gallery at the Athenaeum Art Center (1955 Julian Avenue, San Diego, CA 92113) during open gallery hours, Tuesdays through Saturdays, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., and every second Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m., during the Barrio Art Crawl, and by appointment.

La exposición se puede ver en la Galería Catherine y Robert Palmer en el Centro de Arte Athenaeum (1955 Julian Avenue, San Diego, CA 92113) durante el horario de atención de la galería, de martes a sábado, de 11 a. m. a 4 p. m., y cada segundo sábado de 5 a 8 p.m., durante el Barrio Art Crawl, y con cita previa.