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 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.

21st Annual SDSU Art Council Scholarship Exhibition

Exhibition Dates/Fechas de exposición: May 16–July 3, 2026/16 de mayo–3 de julio de 2026

Opening Reception/Recepción de apertura: Saturday, May 16, 5–8 PM/sábado, 16 de mayo, de 5 a 8 PM

Artist Talk/Charla de artistas: Saturday, June 13, 5–6:30 PM/sábado, 13 de junio, de 5 a 6:30 PM

The Athenaeum Art Center is excited to present the 21st Annual SDSU Art Council Scholarship Exhibition, featuring new work by five exceptional graduate and upper-division undergraduate students from the School of Art and Design at San Diego State University. Since 2002, the SDSU Art Council has recognized outstanding emerging artists with scholarships and the opportunity to exhibit their work at the Athenaeum, one of San Diego's most cherished cultural institutions. 

This year's five recipients gather under a quietly urgent shared theme: the body as a site of history, resistance, and reinvention. Whether mapping chronic pain onto the indifferent American medical system, excavating the layered textures of immigrant memory, or refusing the limits imposed by colonial and binary thinking, these artists use their diverse practices to insist on visibility—for their communities, their experiences, and themselves. 

Andrea Mendoza is a Mexican American painter and metalsmith whose oil paintings draw on the vibrant color traditions of Mexican art and her indigenous heritage. Working through a feminist lens, she reclaims narrative space for overlooked communities, presenting cultural identity with power and pride, and extending the canvas itself into wearable jewelry through metalsmithing. Tina Mardan, an Iranian American interdisciplinary artist, works across photography, painting, drawing, and installation to explore how memory, displacement, and the domestic environment shape a person's sense of belonging. Her layered compositions find the political embedded in the everyday. Todd Bradley is a San Diego–based mixed-media artist whose C7 Series confronts chronic pain, neurodivergence, and American cultural mythology head-on, using collaged medical imagery, book pages, X-rays, and embroidery thread to transform vulnerability into visual power. Ana Saad works in clay and fiber to investigate queerness, gender performance, and communal existence, distorting the natural world into something liminal and uncanny where trees and manufactured spikes carry the weight of growth, defense, and becoming. Isa Ybarra, a mixed-media painter and printmaker, channels Chicanx muralism, skate culture, and DIY activism into works that critique the racial, bodily, and gendered borders born of colonization, creating visibility for the queer Latinx community while challenging the systems that constrain it. 

Together, these five artists make the case that art is not merely aesthetic; it is an act of presence and of claiming space. 

Please join us for an artist talk with the SDSU Art Council Scholarship Recipients. They will share a special presentation on their exhibition, 21st Annual SDSU Art Council Scholarship Exhibition, and discuss how the work connects to their practices and creative processes.

The artist talk will be held in person at the Athenaeum Art Center, Logan Heights. There are no physical tickets for this event. Your name will be on an attendee list at the front door. Doors open at 4:30 p.m. Seating is first come, first served.

Banner image: SDSU Art Council Scholarship Recipients at the 2026 opening reception

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.