HOME / EVENTS / ARTIST TALKS / MAY-LING MARTINEZ & CORALYS CARTER
Within the Context of Time: May-ling Martinez and Coralys Carter
Artist Talk Presented by May-ling Martinez and Coralys Carter
Friday, May 1, 2026
Please join us for an artist talk with May-ling Martinez and Coralys Carter at 5:30pm. An opening reception will take place after the artist talk.
May-ling Martinez
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.
JOAN & IRWIN JACOBS
MUSIC ROOM
Athenaeum Music & Arts Library
1008 Wall Street
La Jolla, CA 92037
ARTIST TALK BEGINS AT 5:30 PM.
OPENING RECEPTION FROM 5:30–7:30 PM.
INDIVIDUAL TICKETS:
Free for all guests
-
The lectures will be in person at the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library. There are no physical tickets for these events. Your name will be on an attendee list at the front door. Doors open at 5:30 p.m. for the artist talk, followed by a general reception. Seating is first-come; first-served. Priority seating will be given to Donor level members and above.
These events will be presented in compliance with State of California and County of San Diego health regulations as applicable at the time of each concert.
-
Payment must be received in order to reserve a spot at a lecture.
Your reservation is not complete until you receive an email confirmation. If you do not receive a confirmation email, your tickets have not been reserved. Please check your inbox and spam/junk folder or contact us at info@ljathenaeum.org or (858) 454-5872 to ensure your booking is finalized.
-
ALL SALES ARE FINAL. No refunds or exchanges. In the event of a cancellation for which there is no rescheduled date, a refund for this ticket may be issued at the option of the management.
Banner image: Porcelain Country, Coralys Carter