West Chapter ConferenceSpeakers

Yvette Marthell

Friday, November 07, 2025 @ 9:00am, 3824 Main St, Riverside, CA 92501

Good Morning

Yvette Marthell (b. 1976) is a Cuban-American interdisciplinary visual artist, photographer, and educator based in Long Beach, California. Her practice explores the body as both subject and site, interrogating identity, representation, and transformation through photography, video, and experimental printmaking.

Marthell's new work continues her exploration of personal narratives, grief, and radical self-acceptance. Her wet-plate collodion series captures still-life florals and landscapes, a profoundly cathartic process in which dying flowers serve as a metaphor for the dissolution of past relationships. Simultaneously, her self-portrait series--set against the vast, arid desert--honors love and body acceptance, paying homage to Laura Aguilar while engaging in an ongoing visual dialogue with Shoog McDaniel through the collaborative project Acceptance, Resilience, and Transformation.

Her earlier works, created during her MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute, remain integral to her practice. Me at 40, a large-scale cyanotype installation, documents her body in a poetic reckoning with time. At the same time, The Boobie Book presents a tactile, intimate collection of handmade prints celebrating the female form. Love, Alleys, and Tears captures raw emotional landscapes through nighttime photography, embodying themes of longing, vulnerability, and connection.

As an educator, Marthell is committed to fostering critical thinking and creative self-expression. She currently serves as an adjunct faculty member at various colleges in the Southern California area. Her work continues to challenge societal perceptions of the body and memory, embracing imperfections and ephemerality as essential to the human experience.