Name: Victoria Martinez: Frente a la vida / Facing Life
Start: 2025-09-20T14:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-09-20T17:00:00-05:00
Location: Poetry Foundation

Victoria Martinez: Frente a la vida / Facing Life

The Poetry Foundationrecognizes the power of words to transform lives. We work to amplify poetry and celebrate poets by fostering spaces for all to create, experience, and share poetry.The Poetry Foundation hosts a robust schedule of free live events throughout the year. Ranging from poetry readings to staged plays to concerts, events have also included artist collaborations, exhibition openings, musical and other performances. Our current events schedule can be found athttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/events.

Poetry Foundation

Join us for a reception and artist talk to celebrate the opening of the exhibition Frente a la vida / Facing Life.

Fall 2025: Facing Life

"Facing Life I take up this unbridled cry," wrote Magda Portal. The Poetry Foundation’s fall 2025 season Facing Life pursues a double dare: we gather through poetry to face ourselves more honestly, while also facing the world and refusing to look away.

Join us for a reception and artist talk to celebrate the opening of the exhibition <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/exhibitions/1706555/victoria-martinez-frente-a-la-vida-facing-life" title="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/exhibitions/1706555/victoria-martinez-frente-a-la-vida-facing-life" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Frente a la vida / Facing Life</a>. The event will feature a conversation between writer Nicole Kaack and artist Victoria Martinez beginning at 2 pm, followed by a reception.Frente a la vida / Facing Life is an exhibition of murals and ceramic paintings by artist Victoria Martinez that responds to the life and work of Peruvian poet and activist Magda Portal (1900–1989). Drawing on Portal’s first book of poetry, Una esperanza i el mar (Hope and the Sea, 1927), Martinez’s paintings in Frente a la vida / Facing Life feature motifs borrowed from Portal’s body of work. Portal’s elegiac writing captured life’s dualities, integrating the hardships of incarceration in authoritarian Peru and deportation with the embodied ecstasies and anguishes of motherhood and romantic love. Rivers, tears, and the sea represent rupture and rebirth, plurality and unity, captivity and independence.Extending these symbolic images, Martinez washes the wall with a painted panorama and floods the windows with transparent fields of color, heightening the permeability of the Poetry Foundation’s architecture and transforming it into an expressive, abstracted terrain. Bridging the near-century between today and the publication of Portal’s first book of poetry, Una esperanza i el mar (Hope and the Sea, 1927), Martinez memorializes Portal’s vital work and invites us to reflect upon change and that which endures.This event is part of the Poetry Foundation’s fall 2025 season, Facing Life.Additional Information<ul><li>All Poetry Foundation events are completely free of charge and open to the public.</li><li>Advanced registration is encouraged.</li><li>The performance space is ADA-compliant and wheelchair-accessible.</li><li>The program will feature ASL interpretation.</li><li>For more information about accessibility at the Poetry Foundation, <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/visit/accessibility" title="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/visit/accessibility" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">please visit our Accessibility Guide</a>.</li></ul>

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Victoria Martinez: Frente a la vida / Facing Life

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Victoria Martinez: Frente a la vida / Facing Life

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