Married Artists Eddie Martinez and Sam Moyer Mount Simultaneous Shows—And Live to Tell All About It (2024)

“Creative collaborations and artist relationships are something to celebrate,” says Mónica Ramírez-​Montagut, the Parrish’s director. “They have made a tremendous positive impact on the field of art.” (The Parrish will also be showing another artist couple, KAWS and Julia Chiang, a few weeks later.) Moyer and Martinez have been together for 17 years. Their four-year-old son, Arthur, is deeply embedded in Martinez’s recent work—images of a rattle and other toys turn up, and a real-life baby wipe stands in for the wing of a butterfly.

The seven 12-foot-high paintings that Martinez will be showing at the Parrish are standing against a wall in his huge Bushwick studio when I visit in late March. He calls them the Bufly series, adopting his son’s pronunciation of butterfly. Arthur became fascinated with butterflies when he saw one in the backyard of their weekend house in Long Island. (They live most of the time in Brooklyn.) “When you’re in that phase with your kid, it’s so psychedelic and fuzzy, and it was like, Okay, now we’ve got to buy butterfly stuff and read to him about butterflies and watch butterfly videos. He’s obsessive, like me.” Moyer sculpted a pair of butterfly wings and sewed them to Arthur’s backpack, and Martinez painted them, and that became his Halloween costume. The first Bufly painting hangs in Arthur’s bedroom.

At her Bushwick studio, a few blocks away from Martinez’s, Moyer shows me a 20-foot-long sculptural mosaic. “It’s a combination of large shapes acting like a stone wall or pile of rocks,” Moyer explains, “with ferns breaking through—a sort of impossible collaboration.” She continues: “I want my work to exist in multiple realms at once. I was thinking about cinema and film and the scale of the screen, and having it be the sole focus when you walk into the room.”

Moyer is tall, funny, and 41 years old, six years younger than Martinez. She is the only child of an artist mother, who also became a therapist, and a father who was the lighting director (or “gaffer”) on John Hughes’s films. They moved from Chicago, where Moyer was born, to Los Angeles when she was five. “I had a lot of freedom and an immense amount of alone time from when I was 10,” she says. “And I always felt a little bit on the outside. I was a kid who was five foot nine in the third grade, and my family was so Midwestern—we’re big people who ate tuna casserole, a Midwestern delight.” She started smoking when she was 12, drinking beer with punks and hanging out with homeless veterans in the “no-man’s-land that is the valley of LA.” She had acquired a 35‑millimeter AE-1 Canon camera, which was always with her. After 10 years in Hollywood, the family moved to the South Shore of Massachusetts, where she finished high school. Next came the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design in Washington, DC, to study photo­journalism, but, she says, “I felt like I needed to use more energy in my body, so I started doing sculpture.” This led to the Yale School of Art, where she got her MFA. She moved to New York when she was 24.

Martinez’s childhood was almost wholly nomadic. He was born on the Naval base in Groton, Connecticut, where his 20-year-old father was finishing a stint in the Navy. (His mother was 19.) Both his parents were Brooklyn-born high school dropouts. They went back to Brooklyn after the Navy, but three and a half years later, “they started moving,” he says, “because they were young and uneducated and needed to figure out how to make money.” The first stop was Port Arthur, Texas (Rauschenberg’s birthplace), where his father worked on an oil rig. Then the family bounced from Port Charlotte and Sarasota in Florida to San Francisco, where Martinez lived with his mom for a year (his parents had separated), and then San Diego for three and a half high school years. After that, it was Beverly, Massachusetts, where Martinez lived with his dad and finished high school. By that time, he knew he was going to be an artist. “It’s the only thing I can do pretty well,” he tells me, laughing. “This is how I live and exist in the world, and I’ll be doing it whenever, forever.” He dropped out of the Art Institute of Boston after one year, though, and out of the Massachusetts College of Art and Design after one month. He was a visual learner but not so great at science, math, and other nonvisual subjects. “I didn’t read when I was young,” he admits. “I became what I am. A lot of it was just surviving. Inconsistency and uncertainty was my character. I was uninformed and not finished. Now at 46, I can pretty confidently say I’m nearing the finish line.”

Martinez is six foot three, and in spite of his salt-and-pepper beard and mustache, he looks like an overgrown kid. After we’ve walked through several large rooms in his studio, he plunks down on a comfortable chair with wheels and asks if I’ll roll with him. I’ve just missed seeing the work he’s done for this year’s Venice Biennale (they shipped yesterday), where he’s representing—of all things—the Republic of San Marino, which chose him out of a sense of general alignment with his wandering spirit. “Martinez’s magpie style of appropriating fragments of imagery and themes emanates from his nomadic background,” says Alison M. Gingeras, the show’s highly innovative curator, whose title for the show is “Nomader.” The works I do see are for a show he’s having at the Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin this June. Martinez’s hands are always in motion, air-sketching, scratching his leg, pulling his hat on and off his head. And so is Martinez himself. He plays killer tennis three times a week, with a friend or a pro, and enthusiastic ping-pong with Moyer. Rolling around the studio with him, I’m reminded of something Moyer told me: “Eddie can only be himself.”

Moyer and Martinez met in 2007 outside a coffee shop in Bushwick. “He seemed like a real established artist,” Moyer tells me. “He had his friends and he was so comfortable. I found out later that this was the first year he could afford to be full-time in his studio.” It was the day after the opening of a group show at Deitch Projects, which energized and established him, and Moyer was just getting started. They kept bumping into each other and pretty soon he asked her out. She moved in with him a few months later, and they got married in 2011.

“Eddie has brought me out of myself in many ways,” Moyer says. “When I met him, I was tough and guarded and competitive. Watching him be so authentic is incredibly inspiring. Eddie’s work is much more of a relationship between him and the viewer than mine is. With Eddie, it’s about him making the work. With me, I just want to disappear. I do not want my ego and persona and action around the work to be part of your experience.”

“Sam has always been ahead of the curve,” Martinez tells me. “She’s a complete artist and crafts person. She’s part engineer, part everything. Her work is timeless and really beautiful, and it’s crazy. I don’t know how she can evoke so much emotion from such intense materials. She’s transcended something. We’re definitely each other’s sounding board and critic and supporter.”

“We work as a unit,” Moyer says. When I ask how they spend their spare time, both of them looked puzzled. “We’re two workaholics who really cherish their studio practices.” Backing her up, Martinez says, “There’s no separation between work and life. That’s what was always attractive to me about being an artist.” (The couple and Arthur did go with friends to Zihuatanejo, on Mexico’s west coast, the day after my visit.)

The advantages far outweigh the disadvantages of being married to another artist for both Moyer and Martinez. “Empathy, shorthand, complete understanding, not having to overexplain,” as Moyer puts it. “We just get it,” says Martinez.

Does jealousy ever arise? “I’m not afraid of owning up to my bad behavior,” Martinez says. “I once opened a show and didn’t sell a single thing, and Sam was on the up and up. And there was one particular instance where I was jealous about Sam showing in a gallery in Europe that I had wanted to show in. I was sour about it, not feeling confident at all. But we don’t have an ongoing rivalry. That would be insane.” Anyhow, there’s no cause for jealousy now—Martinez’s work is widely sought after in today’s market.

Aside from “always leaving his socks on the kitchen counter,” Moyer says, “the most annoying thing about Eddie is that he sees right through me and everyone. So I have had to do the uncomfortable work of becoming more myself for these last 17 years. And it’s awesome.”