Marta Sanchez featured in Mt. Airy Patch
Mt. Airy Artist Receives $15,000 Leeway Transformation Award
by Sara Zia Ebrahimi
January 19, 2011
In an economic climate where most news is about cuts and decreases, it can be refreshing to hear that for some local artists, things are actually flowing quite nicely.
Last week the Philadelphia-based Leeway Foundation announced it awarded Leeway Transformation Award individual grants of $15,000 to nine artists from the Delaware Valley region, including Mt. Airy's Marta Sanchez.
The Leeway Foundation supports women and transgender artists who create social change through their art and cultural work. The foundation works to be committed to art making as an integral part of social change, movement building and anti-oppression work.
Leeway's two grant opportunities are the Art and Change Grant (ACG), which is project specific, and the Leeway Transformation Award (LTA), which is not limited to a specific project. The award is intended to recognize women and trans artists who create art for social change that affects a larger group, audience, or community. Artists must have been creating art for social change for the past five years or more. The hope is that the award will not only honor these artists’ commitment to their work but that it will also help the artists to be able to continue this lifelong practice.
Sanchez is a visual artist and folklorist who says she is inspired to keep Mexican art forms alive and socially relevant. She wants to use her art to facilitate reflection on social issues.
She was also awarded an Art and Change Grant by the Leeway Foundation in 2006 for her Cascarones Por La Vida project. The project brought together Latino youth, artists, and community members to participate in hand-painting Mexican confetti-filled eggs that were sold in a silent auction to raise funds for families affected by HIV/AIDS.
Her primary mediums are oil paint and printmaking. She often works within the "retablo" format, a Mexican traditional process incorporating narrative paintings on tin, integrating poetry or other text into her pieces.
Sanchez's art reveals experiences shared by many Chicanos—displacement in a land where their ancestors lived for centuries spirituality that is rooted in Christianity and indigenous traditions and experiences of birth, work, family, love, and death. Her materials include scrap metal, tinplate, wood and even eggshells.
Sanchez also works to teach and mentor youth. She has worked extensively within the Philadelphia public and private school systems—as well as with college students—and sees great opportunity in sharing her traditional art forms to promote self-confidence and the sense of possibility among Latino and non-Latino youth alike.
Her work includes "The Horizon," a painting symbolically depicting a bridge that she used to cross to get beyond the train yards she grew up near in San Antonio, Texas; "Precious Cargo," a reflection on immigrants who have come to America out of survival rather than pursuit of success; and "Retablo for Marina and Celina," which celebrates two young contemporary Chicana twins who have become great paleontologists.
