Percy Martin is an American artist and teacher. Martin has lived in

Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly known as Washington or D.C., is the capital city and federal district of the United States. The city is on the Potomac River, across from Virginia, and shares land borders with ...

since 1947 and has taught several generations of Washington area art students, including the

University of Maryland The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland, United States. Founded in 1856, UMD is the flagship institution of the Univ ...

, the

Corcoran School of the Arts and Design The Corcoran School of the Arts and Design (known as the Corcoran School or CSAD) is the professional art school of the George Washington University, in Washington, D.C.Peggy McGloneUniversity names first director of Corcoran School of the Arts a ...

and finally at the Sidwell Friends School, where he taught from 1979 to 2009.

Education

Martin studied art and graduated from the

Artwork

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.

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.

His work is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, ''

The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'', locally known as ''The'' ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'' or ''WP'', is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the national capital. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington m ...

'''','' the City of Washington, DC, and the University of Maryland, and has been exhibited widely in galleries, museums, universities, and arts organization such as the Washington Project for the Arts.

Awards

Martin was awarded a Ford Foundation Fellowship in 1966, and nine years later, in 1975 he was also awarded a

National Endowment for the Arts The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created in 1965 as an independent agency of the feder ...

Artist-in-Residence award.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Martin, Percy 20th-century American printmakers Artists from Washington, D.C. African-American contemporary artists American contemporary artists African-American artists 21st-century American printmakers 20th-century African-American artists Corcoran School of the Arts and Design alumni Corcoran School of the Arts and Design faculty University of Maryland, College Park faculty Year of birth missing (living people) Living people African-American printmakers