Working at the intersection of painting and sculpture, Made In LA artist Patrick Martinez makes artworks that draw on the visual particularities of East Los Angeles. His walls made of cinder block enlivened by graffiti and neon directly reference the community’s vernacular architecture and the palimpsests, or layered mark-making, found on the surfaces of city streets. But more than depicting place, Martinez uses these familiar forms to comment on social, economic, and political realities and draw them into a narrative that stretches far into the past. These structures function as vehicles for storytelling, underscoring histories of displacement, gentrification, and cultural survival. Imagery borrowed from Maya murals seems to peek out from beneath commercial signage and peeling layers of paint. Unfolding slowly with visual complexity, these works argue that the past belongs to the present. Martinez’s neon signs speak the urgent language of advertising.