Percy Martin (artist)

For over three decades, Martin has been working on a series of highly technical prints which detail the life, culture and history of an imaginary Bushmen people born out of Martin's imagination.^[5][7][8]

Scenes from the Bushworld play out in Martin's mind as sharply as a movie. The most mundane objects can send him into a cross-dimensional corkscrew. While vacationing in the Ukraine in 1995, for instance, he picked up a smooth, oval stone on a river bank and immediately fell into a quasi-hallucination wherein angry Bushwomen were trying to crack a sacred bird's stone egg with a crystal egg to become High Priestess. "If I could've gotten a jet helicopter, I would've left that second," says Martin.^[8]

His work is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum,^[9] The Washington Post^[10][7], the City of Washington, DC,^[11] and the University of Maryland,^[10][7] and has been exhibited widely in galleries,^[12][5] museums, universities,^[13][14] and arts organization such as the Washington Project for the Arts.^[5][15]

Martin was awarded a Ford Foundation Fellowship in 1966,^[2] and nine years later, in 1975 he was also awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Artist-in-Residence award.^[2]