Gustavo Martinez is a Los Angeles-based artist working with aerial, digital, and film photography. As a son of Mexican migrant parents, his work engages with themes of labor, displacement, memory, and belonging in Los Angeles.  

For more than a decade, Martinez has photographed Inglewood, a neighborhood shaped by gentrification and redevelopment. Vacant lots, abandoned homes, railroads, and construction sites appear across his work as traces of a community navigating transformation. His photographs shift between family portraits and wider aerial views of the city, connecting personal memory to larger social and economic changes. 

His father spent decades working as a gardener throughout Los Angeles. The labor, movement between neighborhoods, and time spent caring for landscapes remain important influences within his practice. Gardening and migration are not abstract ideas within the work, but lived experiences tied to family and community. Photography functions as a way to preserve spaces, histories, and moments that are continually changing. 

Martinez received his MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California San Diego and his BA in Art from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a member of 3B Collective, a Los Angeles-based team focused on public art installations and murals independently and in collaboration with other artists, collectives, galleries, and institutions. They have painted murals for UCLA, El Museo Infantil in Oaxaca, Mexico, The Brick, and Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture.