Anna Marten

Anna Marten is a Kansas City based painter who specializes in sign making and illustration. She approaches traditional processes such as lettering and acrylic painting with whimsy and color. Her professional practice has incorporated hand-painted signs, murals, and displays into Kansas City businesses for the better part of a decade. In 2023, Anna accepted a long term art residency with the grassroots organization Englewood Arts in Independence, Missouri. Independence being her birthplace, this transition stirred a myriad of origin rich emotions coupled with the desire to foster artistic growth within the town. Anna’s current studio practice centers around local enrichment and building relationships with community focused artists. Recent projects include designing a “paint-by-numbers” themed mural in collaboration with H&R Block and Habitat for Humanity volunteers, assisting neighborhood artist Emily Sall to complete a mural for Englewood Arts, and teaching a summer mural class for local teenagers.

Anna Marten pays tribute to actualized fantasy by transforming prints of 35mm photographs into dreamscapes. Inspired by personal relationships, she utilizes candid snapshots from her past and painted glass panes to explore the complexity of memory. Each photographic print is pressed between two glass paintings to form one image. Delving into her own experience with grief, growth, and long distance love, she visually manifests the “glass half full” mentality that often functioned as a survival tool for her psyche. She presents the multilayered pieces as a confession; that fantasy coexists with real occurrence. Lush color palettes represent obscuring sentiments, the things we feel or invent while dreaming with loved ones. Can we examine relationships through memory? Each painting is a study of memory, but not an accurate examination. Nothing can be clinically deduced. What blooms from remembrance isn’t fit for a microscope, but we can make it pretty to look at.