Porcelain Country, Coralys Carter
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
JOSEPH CLAYES III GALLERY
May-ling Martinez May-ling Martinez and Coralys Carter: Within the Context of Time
Please join us for an artist talk with May-ling Martinez and Coralys Carter at 5:30 p.m. An opening reception will take place after the artist talk.
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.
The exhibition can be viewed in the Joseph Clayes III and Carolyn Yorston-Wellcome Rotunda Galleries 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.
MAX & MELISSA ELLIOTT NORTH READING ROOM
Selections from the Athenaeum’s Erika & Fred Torri Artists’ Books Collection
A selection of artists’ books will be showcased in the Max & Melissa Elliott North Reading Room.
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.