Martínez’s Collage series draws inspiration from Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca’s South Texas journey. The artist crafts a narrative that resonates with stories of human survival and endurance told in Ancient steles by incorporating elements of Native American rock art and Mesoamerican visual traditions in his collage work.

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fca06  In 1528, with no smartphone to indicate exactly where it was that he was standing, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca took over eight years to find his way across Texas and the American Southwest and reunite with his Spanish countrymen in what is now the Mexican state of Sinaloa on the west coast.  His experiences and encounters during his trek are related to his book of 1542, “La Relación y Comentarios.”  His keen anthropological observations became a seminal work about the Native American tribes he encountered in the American Southwest, and because of his experiences with them, not all of them pleasant, he nonetheless became their sympathetic spokesman and urged a humane relationship with them….he had been appalled by their treatment at the hands of his countrymen when he finally found them.  ----- In my new “Stele” series of collages, my own “Relación,” so to speak, I try to express a bit of Alvar’s trek in the form of icons and designs inspired by Native American rock paintings, petroglyphs and, more generally, Meso-American visual representations.  Ancient steles found in ruins throughout the Americas tell a compelling story.  My Cabeza de Vaca stele collages are my humble contribution to that kind of storytelling.  ...you might say the theme is human survival in the natural elements.