Martha Rich Holds It Together With Nuts & Screws
ABOVE: Photo of Martha Rich by Andrea Cipriani Mecchi
Any artist will tell you one of the greatest gifts they ever earned was the moment they found their style—their singular take on subject, creation, and process. But much harder earned is the gift of confidence, that ability to continue in one’s style, despite all the criticism, confusion, repudiation, and sometimes despite the real or perceived feelings of futility and invisibility.
Enter Philadelphia-based artist Martha Rich, known for her direct, dry humor and her penchant for creating playful, cutely peculiar animals and bright, bold flora with sometimes cheeky, sometimes sarcastic, but always funny phrases. Rich, who says she struggled for years to make the art she wanted to make, now enjoys showing internationally, and finds steady work creating her signature illustrative art that is sold online and in boutiques through venues like Blue Q, Fringe, and Mincing Mockingbird.
She says she is kidding, but not kidding, when she divulges the secret to unlocking that latter gift of confidence that has helped her launch a self-professed “late-bloomer” career in art: “When I was younger, I cared so much what other people said or thought, and what they thought of my work,” Rich says. “The beauty of getting older is, you don’t really give a shit what people say.”
“If you try and make your art to appeal to other people, it’s not going to be yours, and it’s never interested me to do that anyway,” Rich says. “I make my art for myself, and I just learned not to pay attention to people who thought they knew better. It never works out if you try and please someone else, or work to influence the algorithm.”
That indifference to outside chatter freed Rich to just create what she liked, and how she liked it, beginning when she was a young child. She remembers with a laugh how she created a zine when she was eleven or twelve, called Ye Olde Continental Times, a parody of the women’s magazines that offered everything from exercise and diet advice, to housewife how-to’s—“very tongue-in-cheek, very much a joke.
IT NEVER WORKS OUT IF YOU TRY AND PLEASE SOMEONE ELSE, OR WORK TO INFLUENCE THE ALGORITHM.”
Sometime late in high school, however, she says she left art because, “I was stupid enough to listen to other people. In my twenties I was told, ‘No you can’t do art,’ and like an idiot, I believed them, so I went and got a degree in sociology, and I worked, and did all of the things you’re supposed to do: get a job, get married.”
After working for fifteen years through a series of different cubicle jobs, and going through a divorce, Rich returned to art in earnest, finally attending the art school she wanted to be in during her twenties, finally exploring the elements she had always found fascinating, like cut paper, slick magazine graphics, and different text styles. Rich, who says she loved going in to thrift stores to buy books, paint over pages, and mount them on wood, as inspired by Matisse’s cutouts, figured she’d be a natural for the graphic artist track, but says that she quickly learned she didn’t like the rigidity associated with mastering that particular art form. After taking an illustration class, Rich says she realized that she had found her art love.
“I always liked a freer style, so illustration just felt right to me,” Rich says. “In art school in the late ‘90s I really loved Margaret Kilgallen and Georganne Deen and I would go to the art center library and take out the kids book Esther Pearl Watson wrote and illustrated and pour over them. She’s since become a great friend.”
Words always played into Rich’s art, as well, despite teachers telling her to stop. “Again, people told me: ‘Oh, you can’t put words in your art; it’s supposed to be show, not tell,’ but, I love putting in words and phrases I overhear every day, and people have responded to that.”
Indeed, Rich’s work is widely recognizable for her hand-drawn text, often blurting out random, sometimes sweet, sometimes silly, and other times downright blue phrases that never fail to get a chuckle or a smile from anyone who happens upon her work. Some choice phrases from her latest show in Joshua Tree at Hey There! Projects: “This bar has lasagna,” “Everyone takes pictures of their kids in pumpkin patches,” “I should exercise,” “Order pitchforks from a local business,” “A lot of evil people live too long,” and just “Yep.”
…PEOPLE TOLD ME: ‘OH, YOU CAN’T PUT WORDS IN YOUR ART; IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE SHOW, NOT TELL,’ BUT, I LOVE PUTTING IN WORDS AND PHRASES I OVERHEAR EVERYDAY, AND PEOPLE HAVE RESPONDED TO THAT.”
I JUST LEARNED NOT TO PAY ATTENTION TO PEOPLE WHO THOUGHT THEY KNEW BETTER.”
Rich says she loves to eavesdrop “every day, all the time” to get her phrases, with many of the choicest words coming from close to home. “It’s like analog Twitter here in the city; I can just listen outside my window and hear the best stuff. I don’t even have to try.”
Humor binds Rich’s work the way some artists have a signature palette, or brush stroke, but Rich also has the ability to transmute humor into a vehicle for action, and says she wants to incorporate that more in the near future.
“That’s inspiring to me, the idea of using my art to help generate interest in what’s going on in the world,” Rich says. “I like to use humor, and the animals I draw, to convey the messages I want to emphasize, and I feel like the animals help lighten the tone, which makes them generally more accepted.”
Rich had written a Post-It note to herself back in 2010 that said, “I am scared to be political,” a sentiment that couldn’t be further from her truth in 2025. In 2016, she ran for a local ward seat, and still helps with local politics. Most recently, she has used her artistic talents to forward local political causes by using her drawn rabbit to tell people to vote in local primary elections, and she’s created a cat who tells readers: “Trump always caves. Just say no.”
Rich says she’s also working with a group of artists in Philadelphia to spread awareness of local, national, and global political and social issues. “A lot of people don’t even know, just aren’t aware of what’s really going on,” Rich said. “They watch Fox News and think that’s real, and that’s not right.”
For some of the art Rich makes these days, she sets aside a portion of proceeds to funnel into Juntos, an organization in the Philadelphia area created to assist immigrants. “I live in a great neighborhood, just off Italian Market, and there are so many different immigrants who live here, it’s so vibrant and alive with people; I love it. If I can help in any way, I’m doing it.”
Rich says she draws inspiration from many artists these days, and if she likes to think of her text-driven art as an analog social feed she also likes to focus on creators working in analog: “Right now I admire anyone doing art made by hand! I did go and see the Nick Cave show in NYC recently, and I can’t wait to see the Amy Sherald show at the Whitney! I just love artists,” she says.
Rich says she’s also planning to be part of a group show in New Orleans in 2026. For the rest of the year, she’ll be plugging away at her illustration work, and experimenting with working with new materials, like metal, steel, and concrete.
“I just like to mess around with new material and new ideas,” Rich says. “It’s what makes it all fun.”*
This article first appeared in Hi-Fructose Issue 75, which is available in print here.
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