2025 Martel Award Isabella Roman
Isabella Roman has been selected as the recipient of the 25th Annual Marian and Speros Martel Award of Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH). The Martel Award is given annually to a graduating senior chosen by CAMH in consultation with the visual arts faculty at the senior’s high school. The selection criteria include: production of a significant and meritorious body of work during the senior year, plans to attend an accredited college, university, or art school, and exceptional promise in the visual arts and attendant professions.
With abstractions based on the natural elements of our world and our internal bodily systems, my art embodies an eternal take of our time on earth through the explorations of life and death, and how the two are displayed within my spirituality behind mortality and Mexican and Indigenous culture. Within the past few years of my life, I’ve experienced many death-related events including the loss of my childhood dog, the passing of my classmate, and how there was a chance of never seeing my sister again if she had not survived ovarian cancer. Although these experiences have given me anxiety towards my health and the fear of losing the people I love, death and the pain that comes from grief fuels my creative intentions. In terms of creating my pieces, my process begins with independently discussing overwhelming feelings of somber, regret, joy, and fulfillment in my journal, and to ease myself in a state of mind ready to take on reflection, I often play music or expose myself to movies/shows that tend to explore similar topics of death and longingness such as the bands Y La Bamba and Destroy Boys, or television such as Reservation Dogs, Lisa Frankenstein, My Girl, etc. By exposing myself to this certain media, I often find it easier to channel what I feel called to create, and with writing and processing my vulnerabilities in a space respected as my own, I’ve found the ability to lighten the weight that comes from my tribulations. By manipulating death into various forms of art such as paintings, sculpture, sound, etc., my pieces aim to capture the interconnected energy found within nature and the beauty found in death. With my spirituality and life experiences fueling my body of work, my art represents how death doesn’t only hold ugliness, darkness, pain, and grief, but also the beauty that is made from lessons to form light and new beginnings.
— Isabella Roman, 2025 Martel Award Recipient
About Isabella Roman
Isabella Roman is an Indigenous and Mexican queer artist and a graduating senior from Kinder HSPVA, living in Houston, Texas.
As someone who ponders reality through human life and death experiences, and someone who cherishes and feels deeply for all of their memories, loved ones, and even places in which they’ve made memorable moments, these sentimentalities intensely fuel Roman’s motivation to create.
Their pieces are based on birth and mortality as a way to process the disappointment, ugliness, and beauty found within life and death because Roman believes these are the things that need just as much attention and care. Roman lives life by practicing empathy and vulnerability, and with the help of their spiritual practices, manifestations, prayers, and intense introspections, Roman’s art proceeds to carry overwhelming realities laid upon by death. Using mediums such as watercolor and acrylic paintings, ceramics, and mixed media, Roman’s body of work maintains a focal point on the many ways they can abstract energy-like forms and natural earthly occurrences, along with motifs such as graveyards, worms, centipedes, maggots, plants, bones, and flowers in order to seek the fulfilment of just how fragile and appreciative they can be of life in terms of how familiar death is. Pursuing the arts, Roman will be attending Reed College in Portland, Oregon. After experiencing Art League Houston in 2023 and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (Minnesota) Pre-College summer program for animation with a full scholarship (2024), along with presence in the Houston art scene through group exhibitions such as the Hardy and Nance Studios Black and White exhibition, their love for art grew as they showcased their passion to not only the public, but to themself, causing Roman to realize how much love they hold for creating. Through their art, Roman demonstrates multiple interests in medicinal plants, human body functions, and animals in spirituality, and they plan on taking on a double major in Studio Art and Neuroscience as a way to pursue all their passions and interests.
As someone that heals through art, Roman would like to study this academic path as it will not only allow them to study different ways we as humans can heal, but it will also allow them to apply key interests to art and explore the different ways they can express themselves while maintaining their practice.
Work Samples
by Isabella Roman
