Art + Artists

April Marten works across media including sculpture, installation, performance art, video, and book arts. Marten’s socially engaged artistic practice developed out of her personal experience—and, ultimately, her escape—from a fundamentalist religious cult. Common themes in her work include the feminine dilemma, religious identity, patriarchal systems of power, and social violence. In much of her current work, Marten invites the audience in as co-creators, together engaging in acts meant to confront systems of power that oppress vulnerable populations. Her recent concerns focus on what she sees as national and global threats to democracy by authoritarian populist movements. Marten earned her BFA in Drawing and Painting from Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, Georgia; completed graduate level course work in Sculpture at Winthrop University, Rock Hill, South Carolina; and is a 2020 MFA candidate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the recipient of a 2016 Placemaking Micro-Grant for a public art project from Charlotte Center City Partners and her work has been exhibited throughout the south, including at the Fine Arts Gallery, Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw, Georgia; International Cultic Studies Association Annual Conference, Dallas, Texas; and in Charlotte at Gallery Twenty-Two, C3Lab, Union Shop, and in the Mint Museum’s 80 x 80: An Art Show.