Who Gets to Eat Happy? Narsiso Martinez at Charlie James Gallery
By Kristine Schomaker A paper shopping bag hung on the wall at Charlie James Gallery. Javier’s, across the front. Under a tree, drawn in soft browns, a man lies in the grass with his hat tipped and his body finally still. A nap. Or maybe the only ten minutes he’s had to himself all day.
Narsiso Martinez draws on the things we throw away without thinking. The bag, the produce box, the clamshell. And on them he draws the people we disregard just as easily. The farmworkers who pick our food and work so hard for us.
The show was called Eat Happy. Funny title when you sit with it. Eat happy. Who gets to?
Some background if you don’t know him. Born in Oaxaca in 1977, he came to the US at 20. According to MOLAA, he spent nine seasons working in apple orchards in Eastern Washington to pay for school. BFA from Cal State Long Beach in 2012, MFA in 2018. So when he draws someone bent over a row of crops, he isn’t imagining it. He’s been that person.
The bags
For years Narsiso drew on discarded produce boxes. Then the grocery bags showed up. A painted Whole Foods bag in 2023, bags mounted on canvas in 2025. In Eat Happy they were front and center, mounted to wood panels and canvas. He doesn’t cover anything up. Logos, handles, folds, corrugated edges, bright printed fruit. All of it stays.
A single worker crouches in a field drawn on the bottom of a produce tray, and the tray’s cheerful graphics wrap around him like a frame. A flattened organic apple box puts a worker on a ladder next to Mickey Mouse. Nobody planned that pairing.
On a Lazy Acres bag, a farmworker about to empty his sack of fruit into a bin seems to be laughing at the store’s slogan, “Live Healthy, Eat Well.” On a Trader Joe’s bag, a worker glances down at the printed kids asking about recycling. I laughed out loud. These bags carried somebody’s groceries. Now they hang in collectors’ homes.
Crate labels and Currier & Ives
It made me think of those old Southern California citrus crate labels. Sunshine, orange groves, a pretty girl holding a lemon, mountains in the distance. (The LA Public Library has more than 200 of them online.) They sold a place and a promise. Abundance. Easy, golden, ready to eat.
And Currier & Ives prints, old pastoral paintings, the tidy farm with the happy family and the cow. A dream of rural life. Narsiso’s fields look like those fields. Except he puts the people who do the work right in the middle. Crouching. Carrying. Resting. In one, a group of workers in the rows with a portable toilet off to the side. The crate labels left that out.
Faces on the money
The piece I keep going back to is the three portraits. Three oval frames with fancy borders, three faces in black and white, gold behind them, a pile of pumpkins and fruit along the bottom.
My first thought was the dollar bill. My second was See’s Candies. Mary See on the box, smiling like she baked every piece herself. Her face is the guarantee. Good, wholesome, made with love.
So whose face should be on our food?
The currency idea isn’t me reading too much into it. In a 2024 BOMB interview with Annabel Keenan, he talked about his 2018 piece Always Fresh, which uses gold leaf and details from the dollar bill. He put a woman farmworker where the president would go, as a way of honoring women and the opportunities they’ve been denied. The gold came from learning the US economy used to be backed by gold.
I also can’t look at gold behind a face without thinking of church. Icons, saints, the Virgin glowing in a gold field. That’s my reading, not his. Money and devotion on the same surface. In my head, the motto on this money isn’t In God We Trust. It’s We Feed You.
Where this lives in art history
Narsiso names Millet, Van Gogh, and Siqueiros as influences. Artists who painted labor like it mattered. Millet’s Gleaners from 1857, three women bent double picking up what’s left after the harvest. Van Gogh’s peasants with their heavy hands.
And somehow I keep thinking about Manet’s The Ragpicker at the Norton Simon in Pasadena. Painted around 1865 to 1870. A man who made his living collecting what Paris threw away, standing more than six feet tall on the canvas. That’s a size usually saved for kings, saints, and gods. The Salon still prized history paintings, mythology, and portraits of the wealthy, and Manet painted the guy picking through the trash. Manet isn’t on Narsiso’s list. That connection is mine. But the ragpicker lived off discarded things, and Narsiso makes his work on them. Both give someone from everyday life the scale and attention art usually reserved for the powerful.
Then Siqueiros, who painted América Tropical on Olvera Street in 1932, a mural about exploitation that got whitewashed almost as soon as it went up. Right here in LA. A few miles from where Eat Happy hung.
Then the 1930s. Social Realism, the WPA, Dorothea Lange photographing a pea picker and her kids in Nipomo in 1936. The gallery places Narsiso’s work in that lineage too. Then the farmworker movement in the 60s, the Delano grape strike, the posters and prints of Chicano artists who put the people in the fields front and center.
Narsiso picks that up and does something those artists couldn’t. The packaging IS the argument. The box that shipped the strawberries, the bag that carried them home. The image of the worker and the marketing that erased him share the same surface.
Museums have noticed. Frieze Impact Award in 2023. Work in the collections of the Hammer, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Amon Carter, the Crocker, OCMA, MOLAA, and more. Shown at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Drawings on cardboard boxes in museum collections!
He also curated the group show that ran alongside this one, Food and Beyond, Beyond Food, with four women artists thinking about nourishment. The whole building was about what feeds us.
So, eat happy
Food and I have a long, complicated relationship. Comfort, reward, stress, celebration, all of it. And I don’t think about where my food comes from nearly enough. I open an app, something shows up at my door in a paper bag, I eat it, the bag goes in the recycling. The whole chain of hands that got it to me is invisible.
This show made it visible. Every bag on that wall was a bag I’ve carried.
The people in these drawings are often immigrants. The gallery itself points out how much the industry relies on undocumented workers. They work in heat, near pesticides, for not nearly enough. And immigration is in the news every day right now. Narsiso doesn’t make it a slogan. He draws them. Careful, dignified, on the same packaging their work fills.
And yes, I run a magazine called Art and Cake, so I have to talk about “Let them eat cake.” Quick fact check: there’s no evidence Marie Antoinette ever said it, and the original French line was about brioche, not cake. It stuck around anyway. It’s what someone says when they have no idea what being hungry is like.
Narsiso’s workers are not hungry abstractions. They’re resting. Eating lunch. Looking right back at you. In the BOMB interview he described workers eating on the ground near pesticide spraying, from his own experience. So someone resting under a tree isn’t a sweet scene. It’s a break in a long day of someone else’s work.
I don’t think the point is guilt. I think the point is to notice. To let the people who grow our food be as real to us as the logo on the bag.
Back to the bag
That man under the tree on the Javier’s bag. When I first saw it I thought, nap. Now I think, rest he earned and probably didn’t get enough of.
Narsiso Martinez: Eat Happy was on view September 25 through November 7, 2026 at Charlie James Gallery, 969 Chung King Road, Los Angeles. cjamesgallery.com
Photos by Kristine Schomaker
