TAPinto New Brunswick's People to Watch in 2024: Martryce Roach

Travelers dashing through Newark Liberty International Airport’s Terminal A have been stopped in their tracks by the sight of Martryce Roach’s giant mural of 11 Black women standing arm in arm. So moved by the image’s message of unity, they’ll sometimes pose for selfies in front of it, locate her on social media, and send their photos to her.

“There is some art that's just aesthetically beautiful and that's the purpose of it and I think that's beautiful,” said Roach, one of TAPinto New Brunswick’s 10 People to Watch in 2024. “For me, I don't create just to make something beautiful. I create because there's a message. I want people to hear something, to feel something, to walk away differently. My art is an experience, and when people have that experience, that's what is important to me.”

Roach’s artwork may be hung in public spaces, but it lives in the viewers’ hearts and souls.

Just ask anyone who saw her four-panel piece about food insecurity that hung in the windows of Harvest Moon Brewery & Café on George Street as part of the Windows of Understanding program.

Or ask anyone who was there in October for the unveiling of her mural depicting tomorrow’s superstars hitting home runs and making diving touchdown catches that adorn the side of a building at the Youth Sports Complex on Joyce Kilmer Avenue.

The year 2023 also included an exhibition of her work at the Howard County Welcome Center in Ellicott City, Md., and a display of work at the Overlook Medical Center in Summit.

Art was more of a pastime than a passion for Roach growing up in New Brunswick. She started to dabble more and more with painting as a way to relieve the stress inherent to her work as a social worker investigating reports of abuse and neglect among families.

Friends who saw a message in her bright colors and dreamlike imagery inspired by Harlem Renaissance painters such as Archibald Motley, Aaron Douglas, and Jacob Lawrence began to encourage her to do more.

Public art, however, was a lane she just sort of fell into. Again, it was the prompting of someone else – Tracey O’Reggio Clark at the New Brunswick Community Arts Council – that convinced her that she could transfer her talents from a canvas to a wall or storefront.

“Creating public art excites me,” Roach said. “I feel like I have a purpose in what I do. And, so, to be able to be given these large platforms where masses of people can receive this message that's been put into me to deliver, it's just exciting.”

There’s already a lot on her plate and on her easel in her living room-turned-studio for 2024.

She will be working with the New Brunswick Fire Department’s Vulcan Pioneers for next year’s Windows of Understanding project, with the resulting artwork scheduled to hang in the windows of the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center.

She plans to display 20 pieces or so in a solo exhibition scheduled for the Akwaaba Gallery in Newark.

Three of Roach’s pieces will be on display at the Rye Arts Center in Westchester County, N.Y., opening Feb. 1.

Closer to home, two pieces of Roach’s work will be on display at Above Art Studios at 55B Morris St. in New Brunswick beginning Saturday, Dec. 30.

She is also continuing to work on a whimsical yet serious collection of paintings called “The Aquarium,” which seeks to reveal the private lives of ordinary people during moments when they look away from homelessness on the street or fail to be at home for their children.

“I'm talking about all different types of things that we like to keep private, but I'm putting it boldly on display through my art, like life in a fishbowl,” Roach said. “In the fishbowl, there's no privacy. Everything is on display. And so, to play on that absurdity, the idea is that I'm putting all of the images in a fishbowl. So there are bubbles and there's water and plant life and fish swimming around. Because it's so whimsical, it just makes it a bit more palatable for people to receive. So it's fun, but it's important.”

Story By: Chuck O'Donnell
Photo Credit: Martryce Roach