Multimedia artist Shantell Martin is not here to tell you how to interpret her work. The large-scale black-and-white drawings and notebook sketches that have garnered her global acclaim are but a canvas for the viewers to bring their own imagination to life. “I like the idea of conceptually imagining that I'm creating the foundation of the work,” Martin tells The Center Magazine.

“People bring the color themselves. So if you look at a black and white drawing of mine, it's not the absence of color — because when people come and see the work, they imagine the color within it,” she says.

These works, and many more, are now on display around Rockefeller Center’s campus in the public art pop-up series Art in Focus through November 7. Produced in partnership with the Art Production Fund, the exhibition celebrates the breadth and diversity of Martin’s body of work while providing an extensive understanding of her practice, from her illustrations to her collaborations with brands and art world establishments.

Born in Southeast London to a working-class mother, Martin credits her early artistic inclinations to the cartoons she’d see on television, from Captain Planet and ThunderCats to The Smurfs and G.I. Joe. “I’d draw different characters and worlds and imagine what could be going on in them and beyond them,” she says. Despite describing her upbringing as not particularly art-filled, her first and most formative creative collaboration began with her grandmother.

“[She] did have a craft because that generation, regardless of class or background, was a generation that was more craft-based. More people tended to be carpenters or seamstresses. More people had physical and tangible skills,” Martin explains. “And I think that was the case with my grandmother. She loved to do needlepoint.” When Martin commissioned her grandmother to sew her a t-shirt in her teenage years that said “Half White, 1980” in black-and-white, it sparked a 20-year collaboration that would be shown in museums around the world — and now, at Rockefeller Center.

Martin attended London’s Central Saint Martins, where she honed her signature artistic style. “What [Central Saint Martins] did mostly for me was expose my work to a different audience and exposed me to different types of people,” she explains. “The work I was creating then was very similar to the work that I'm creating now: mostly black-and-white, lots of questions with performance mixed in there, too.”

In addition to the aforementioned needlepoint collaborative pieces done with Martin’s grandmother and consumer products done in partnership with brands like Puma and establishments like amfAR and the Whitney Museum of American Art, other works currently on view throughout Rockefeller Center include three different long accordion sketchbooks created between 2003 and 2008, which Martin dubs her KOOBS series (“books” spelled backward). One has been blown up to be over 100 feet long. “They're a mixture of voyeuristic observations, thoughts and questions and imaginations all mixed up within them. It's some of my favorite work that I've ever made,” she says. “Because there's so much of me in there, and so much of me not being naïve. You know, when you just make art because that's what you want to do. You just go home and you draw because that's what you want to do.”

Much of Martin’s work is done through performance, where she draws large-scale illustrations live while an audience looks on, incorporating music and spoken-word poetry. “I was interested in the idea of doing things live, in the ephemerality of that, the passing of that,” she says. Three pieces shown in Art in Focus were drawn live in front of an audience, creating new works and teaching people throughout the process. “And for me, that's really important, because what's the point in art if it doesn't create that kind of connection where someone feels a part of it and they can experience it in some way? I love exposing the process in that way and bringing people into it.”

Another notable performance from Martin’s repertoire is her multimedia collaboration with rapper Kendrick Lamar, which took place at the 2016 Art Basel Miami Beach. “With Kendrick, he started making beats, and to see him work live I'm like, ‘Oh, that's how I do it, too.’ But like, on a whole different kind of level doing it. But I think there's something very special about the creative process and the commonalities between different mediums and industries,” Martin says. “It's just really nice to see someone being authentically them and being open to collaboration and to be inspired by someone else, but then also be there to inspire the other person.”

Having lived in New York City for 16 years, Martin’s Art in Focus exhibition celebrates her work in a landmark setting, in the very city that had great influence on those works. “It's iconic in so many different ways. Those entrances and doors and the mazes in between, the consistent amount of events and arts and fashion culture that they have going on there. It's just very special to contribute to that in many ways,” she says. “When you walk around the Rock Center, you see these murals —there's that Dean Cornwell mural in the entrance to Christie's, where I did two of the live drawings. It’s like, ‘wow!’ In a way, I've contributed and am part of something very historic and substantial in New York.”

When asked about the motivation to create her art live with onlookers, she explains there’s a layer of façade that is removed and truth in creativity is revealed. “It's the audience making you be honest. When you work by yourself behind closed doors, there's more chance that you will think about where it might be going and the expectations of you and the work,” Martin says. “But when you create work, you perform work live, if it's improvised, if you're drawing live and you don't know what you're going to be drawing, you actually don't have time to be anyone else.”

Shantell Martin’s artwork will be on view around the Rockefeller Center campus through November 7, 2024. This installation is part of Art in Focus, a series of art exhibitions produced in partnership with Art Production Fund.