My first modeling experience was for my father at age seven. He created his art studio using the garage space of our modest house in Compton, California,–1503 Broadacres Street. While everybody else in the neighborhood worked on their cars and stored typical household items in their garages, our garage was my dad’s art studio with the smell of paint and turpentine wafting off the brushes and stretched canvases poised all around the studio.
Curiously, all of the painted portraits are captured from my left side. Hm-m-m.
L. Martina Young is a dance artist, writer-orator, myth scholar, Somatics Educator. Originally from Los Angeles, Martina is a multi-year NEA Fellow (1983-85) and recipient of Nevada’s Governor’s Arts Award for Excellence in the Arts (2008). For 22 years she has maintained a radical hospitality space at her artist loft in the arts district of downtown Reno, NV bringing community residents, civic leaders, and artists together. Her essay, “FLOOD/Mayim, Mayim”—on her aesthetic process of unpacking the mythic imagery of ‘water’ for her 1997 community-interactive performance work FLOOD—was published in Mark Curtis’s book, One Of A Kind: The People and Places That Make Reno The Biggest Little City in the World (2019). Martina was chosen by Stevie Wonder to be the solo dancer in his 1983 music video, Ribbon in the Sky. She’s also the soloist in Julie Dash’s 1977 award-winning film, Four Women, which she choreographed to Nina Simone’s searing song of the same title.
