VENAZIR
MARTINEZ
Street Artist | Visual Anthropreneur
Phone:
+415 608 8434 - USA
+63 945 277 7740 - PH
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The Artist
Venazir Martinez is a Filipino visual anthropreneur, and a street muralist. She graduated cum laude with a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the University of the Philippines Baguio. She was awarded Best Thesis through her art and advocacy entitled Hila-bana. This street art hunt challenged the public's visual perception through cultural emblems to revitalize Filipino ancestral heritage.
Project Hila-bana gained traction in 2018 in Baguio City, Philippines. The title was derived from the Filipino term hilbanahan, meaning temporary stitching. The street art movement is unified by a red thread that serves as a visual guide for the public in search of our featured Filipino identities across the globe.
She co-founded 23 Sampaguita Artist Collective, cultivating art education and cultural exchanges between artists to catalyze positive social change. She is the founder of Sining Eskinita, a multi-sensorial street art festival that activates dull alleys into creative platforms. Together with 23 Sampaguita, their vision is to guide artists from all disciplines to set the streets in the Philippines as instant institutional grounds for creative development.
"Cultural Identity is my Prominent Stroke"
Her creations are influenced by the narratives of cultural advocates she met on her creative journey. Her paintings illustrate realistic representations of people from many cultures. Fragmented and animated, her style is a progressive visual approach to Abstract Realism which pictures the multifacetedness of ourselves and the influences that shaped our core values as a nation.
Venazir's intense fascination with discovering one's identity became her spiritual pursuit and purpose in life, prompting her to define the multiple meanings of being a "Filipino" by weaving the red string one wall at a time.