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

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.”