There are moments in life—fertile, cinematic instants—when our many latent contradictions blossom suddenly, simultaneously. Daniel Martinez’s came in the summer of 2004, he says, “about the time Mars was closest to Earth.”

It was an August night. He’d been looking at the red planet through his 750 mm telescope, reflecting maybe on Ray Bradbury’s depiction of the place as a celestial Wild West for Americans fleeing atomic wars. Then Martinez hit the sack, and in that first delightful moment of sleep his building was hit by something like a bomb—a dark blue Ford Thunderbird blasting through his garage and a steel gate before coming to a full stop in the living room of his home in the West Broadway Arts Studios.

In the first of many salient acts, Martinez grabbed his 9 mm pistol and trained it on “five frying gangsters” inside the T-bird.

“I could smell the alcohol immediately,” Martinez says. “Their eyes were blood red. There were forties rolling around inside. The driver had this huge laceration on his head. They were all drunk and frying on something—really frying. They had no idea where they were.”

Fluid leaking from the car pooled on his floor.

Martinez called 911 and then waited. The gangsters appraised their circumstances: an artist (muralist, sculptor, illustrator) held them at gunpoint in a studio hung with calaveras—skeletons—for the upcoming Day of the Dead.

Martinez waited for police. He put on a pot of coffee and made some soup.

After two hours, it was clear “the cops weren’t going to come, so I had to resolve the situation myself.” Martinez probed a tender spot he discovered in his captives, at the intersection of their psychotropic drug use and Catholic paganism; he pointed out the 10-foot skeletons depending from his ceiling as evidence of his dark power; he described the torture awaiting men who mess with a shaman.

Four of the men put their battered driver in the back seat, and then rolled the Thunderbird backward over concrete, glass and iron, out onto Maine, and into the darkness.

“I think by the time they left,” he says, “they were more worried about my spells than my bullets.

“The cops arrived a while later. They said they’d had a busy night.”

• • •

Raised in Long Beach, a graduate of its university, artist Daniel Martinez has fought off homewreckers before. Generally, he says, they’re dressed in suits and they come from City Hall. That’s because artists are to real estate what a Geiger counter is to radiation. Artists—painters, actors, musicians and poets (not poets)—are a leading indicator of a neighborhood’s renaissance. Martinez is an artist of sublime talent; in sketches for his murals—he claims 57 of them out in the world—tiny lines bear tremendous emotional weight, weight that’s almost always about the pain of class warfare, about “the power of the rich to treat poorer people as if they just don’t matter.” He doesn’t resent the fact that he’s attractive to developers, that his presence in an otherwise benighted stretch of asphalt is what real estate agents call a “feature,” that he and other artists are capitalism’s leading edge in prying open marginal land. He resents the fact that in order to get that land (he suspects) developers and city officials collude in purging artists. Call it aesthetic cleansing.

The cops who wouldn’t drive one minute to arrest the Thunderbird crew were acting politically. Their inaction, he charges, was policy—not mere laziness or disdain: “it’s designed that way, to get artists and others out, to gentrify the neighborhood.”

In 2006, he moved out of the West Broadway Arts Studios after receiving notice he was trespassing—he and perhaps a score of other artists. The building in which they had created a community was condemned for lofts, he thinks, and bulldozed.

One year later, the land is still vacant.

• • •

A few days ago, Martinez was drinking beers at Clancy’s with Thomas Hubbard, the artist and printmaker. They’ll be among the 60 or so artists showing their work at this Saturday’s Tour des Artistes in the East Village—a tangle of artistic and real estate relationships with which Martinez and Hubbard aren’t entirely comfortable. (Full disclosure: The District is a sponsor.)

Like Martinez, Hubbard left West Broadway Arts Studios on the business end of a bulldozer; he ended up in San Pedro, along Sixth Street. A developer there recently booted Hubbard and the other artists in residence—kicked them out with the aid of city officials intent on redeveloping the area.

Hubbard has had enough of redevelopment schemes that follow artists from one neighborhood to another, transforming artiness into a fungible asset, evicting the artists, and then building homes—lofts, maybe—for sale at a price few artists can afford. He’s moving to Albuquerque.

“I can afford Albuquerque,” Hubbard says. “I can’t afford to lose two studios in one and a half years.”

TOUR DES ARTISTES EAST VILLAGE ARTS DISTRICT | LINDEN AVE BETWEEN BROADWAY AND FIRST STREET | SAT NOON-10PM | FOR TICKET INFORMATION VISIT EASTVILLAGEARTSDISTRICT.COM

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