Legacy

1930’s

Martha Joanne Powell was born in 1930 in Berkeley, California and was the only child of Foster Wise Powell and Julia Vivian Kane. Her father was an attorney and her mother worked as a legal secretary. During the Depression, they had financial trouble and when Martha was two years old, they moved to Winterset, Iowa to live with her father’s parents. There, in the beautiful home, Martha recalls staring for hours at a china collection in a glassed cupboard. Her memory of the exquisite display of untouchable objects remained so vivid that it likely sparked her early interest in still life. In 1938, they relocated to San Diego, where Martha’s father secured a job with a law firm.

1940’s

Martha’s family moved to La Mesa, a suburb of San Diego. She visited the San Diego Museum of Art (then the Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego) for the first time. She attended Grossmont High School where she began to study art. She went on to attend San Diego State University (SDSU) to study art under impressionist painter and professor Everett Gee Jackson. Martha met her future husband and psychology student, Edward Franklin Alf Jr. at SDSU. In 1949, she changed her major to clinical psychology.

1950’s

In 1951, Martha and Edward were married before Edward was drafted for service in Korea. Martha quit SDSU her junior year and moved with Edward to Monterrey, California. In 1952, Martha returned to SDSU and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in psychology, with a minor in art. The couple had one child, Richard (d. January 4, 2012). The next year, the family moved to Seattle, Washington for three years, where Martha did social work. She returned to San Diego in 1956 and began graduate studies at SDSU in clinical psychology. She eventually solely pursued art.

1960’s

In 1961, Martha began monthly art trips to Los Angeles. In 1963, she taught drawing and design courses at SDSU, while she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting. She abandoned teaching to focus full-time on her artmaking. She became interested in chiaroscuro and the work of Vermeer, da Vinci, Rembrandt and Caravaggio and studying old master techniques. In 1965, Martha made her first trip to New York City and Washington, D.C. to visit museums. After, she began to study women artists and gender issues in the art world. In 1968, Martha was accepted into the MFA Pictorial Arts program at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). She studied painting with Sam Amato, William Brice, Richard Diebenkorn, Lee Mullican, and James Weeks. 

1970’s

In 1970, Martha received an MFA from UCLA. Alf first became recognized as a nationally significant artist for her 1970’s "cylinder paintings," or toilet paper rolls. Three of these paintings were selected by curator Marcia Tucker for the 1975 Biennial of Contemporary Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. At this time, Alf signed with Joni Gordon’s Newspace gallery (the first of two locations) on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles for representation. She painted many of the cylinder paintings in unorthodox colors that express a range of emotions. She approached the series as Josef Albers had in his "Homage to the Square" series, by repeating a constant image from painting to painting, but varying the colors. In the late 1970s, Alf turned to making graphite drawings of fruits and vegetables which she arranged like characters on a stage. 

1980’s

Alf shifted from black and white to color in her pastel drawings of the early 1980’s. Continuing to draw staged fruits, with the pear being the dominant subject, Alf exaggerated color and light. Alf returned to painting in the late 1980’s, producing a series of painted depictions of pears rendered in colors so bright and intense that an art critic referred to them as "psychedelic pears."

1990’s

Alf concentrated almost exclusively on photography, which she practiced for many years alongside painting and drawing. Concurrent with the 1970’s-cylinder paintings, Alf made photographs of toilet paper rolls as a means of studying color. Before photographing an unused roll, the artist dyed it using colored markers. She subsequently made photos of other subjects, including her familiar fruits and vegetables. In 1998, Alf began making photographs of pigeons roosting on a window sill opposite her home. She fed them to keep them coming, named each pigeon, created narratives for them, and produced a video featuring the pigeons, entitled "Birdland."

2000 – 2019

Alf began photographing still life arrangements of unusual objects that she had collected over the years. In "New Glass City" (2002), Alf responded to the events of September 11, 2001 by creating a visual metaphor for a new metropolis, which she did by photographing an arrangement of several glass objects that glisten as they reflect sunlight.