Museum Acquisition

The painting was presented by EDJI Gallery at The Armory Show 2025 as part of Two Bucks, Martin’s immersive installation staged as a fictional Midwestern queer dive bar. Blending personal history with archival research, the presentation imagined a space where queer memory could be preserved and shared across generations.

Within that broader narrative, Yesterday's Utopia (on Ghosts, Dreams, and Joy) stands as one of the exhibition's most personal works. The composition layers a candid photograph of Martin and their husband, with the image of Martin's late uncle, Marty, taken from a film still. Rendered first as an underpainting before reappearing in delicate coloured pencil, Marty's presence remains both visible and elusive, existing as memory and inheritance

Martin has often reflected on the ways queer lives continue through memory. Rather than treating the past as something distant, Yesterday's Utopia (on Ghosts, Dreams, and Joy) brings different generations into the same pictorial space, suggesting that queer histories persist not only through archives but also through the people who carry them forward.

The work speaks to themes that run throughout Martin's practice: the fragility of memory, the gaps left by histories that were never fully documented, and the possibility of rebuilding those histories through art. At once intimate and elegiac, it considers how joy and loss can coexist, and how love, identity, and kinship endure across time.

The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, the world's only dedicated LGBTQIA+ art museum, is committed to preserving and exhibiting queer art and supporting the artists who create it. The acquisition of this painting places Martin's work within a collection that has played a vital role in documenting and celebrating LGBTQIA+ artistic practices for nearly four decades.

This acquisition marks an important milestone in Robert Martin’s practice and reflects the growing institutional recognition of their work. We extend our sincere thanks to everyone involved in making this acquisition possible, and our warmest congratulations to Robert on this significant achievement.