I met Martine Syms at a microscopic art gallery in Los Angeles’s Chinatown in 2012. We’d both been invited to give presentations to an audience so small we were essentially performing for each other, and although I can’t remember what either of our talks was about, Martine’s slides had a deep purple background—her signature color—and featured an elegant font I’d never seen before (a year later, the font, Lydian, was everywhere). At the time, she was calling herself “a conceptual entrepreneur.” Thinking about it now, I’m not sure if she meant she was an entrepreneur only conceptually, or that she sold ideas. Both might have been true, but neither quite encompasses the artist she was then, and has since become.

Martine was born in Altadena, California, in 1988. She was homeschooled off and on by her parents and spent her teen years in Los Angeles’s DIY art and music scene, volunteering at all-ages punk venues and experimental cinemas and shilling zines before going to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After graduating, she ran a speakeasy project space called Golden Age there for five years. When she came back to LA, she founded Dominica Publishing, dedicated to exploring Blackness in visual culture. In 2017, she had her first solo show at MoMA; she was barely thirty. Since then, it’s been a whirlwind: solo shows at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London; a Creative Capital Award, a Tiffany Foundation Biennial Competition Award, a Future Generation Art Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship; teaching at CalArts and earning an MFA from Bard College; commercial work for high-end fashion houses; and, in 2022, her feature directorial debut, The African Desperate, a witty, scathing, formally audacious send-up of art-school delusions.