In 1974, Cochise College (then Cochise Community College) in Douglas, AZ hired Martinez to spearhead a new ceramics instruction program. Not knowing the first thing about ceramics at that time, he asked a knowledgeable friend from Fort Worth to come to Arizona and give him a crash course in ceramics. He caught on, and teaching and creating ceramics would become his daily pursuit through the 1970s continuing into the 21st century when he finally retired from his position in 2012. During that time, Martinez taught countless students, many of whom took his classes over and over again, and helped expand the ceramics program from the Douglas campus to the Sierra Vista campus where he also taught toward the end of his tenure. 

Martinez’s painting, printmaking, and multimedia output of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s adds an important voice to the critique of the theater of modern politics and media, especially as it relates to the art establishment. The imagery of the large canvas paintings, lithographs, drawings, and even ceramic works draws on a legacy of Surrealism while developing a visual language referencing a mythical perception of the American Southwest through symbolism and metaphor. For example, the painting, “The Gift: The New Dark Age” depicts an overwhelmingly large and ominous dark geometric cube shape, reminiscent of Kubrick’s black monolith from the film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” rising in the sky above a highway and desert landscape foreground. Bright red shiny teeth-bared lips peek over the horizon like a sunrise. Above, the edge of a mirror reflects a fragment of ground and the body of a snake slithering past. The mouth, snake, and highway motifs recur frequently in Martinez’s works and represent deities to evoke a sense of significance. Martinez says "I employed recognizable objects for symbolic purposes, sometimes for universal, other times for more personal reasons. [I used] the serpent or snake because universally it always seems to conjure up evil or Satan, but on a more personal level, I just like them… I think of the highway as the road or path of our lives as we pass through it. The mouth, and more specifically the feminine mouth, represents the seduction of corporate mass media in my mind. Marshall McLuhan said the medium is the message, and this is critical to my concept of The New Dark Age. In the first Dark Age, most people were illiterate. There were essentially no books, and thus, there was a vast, debilitating lack of information… As a result, conspiracy theory was rampant as people tried to make sense of events. In this New Dark Age we are experiencing, it is just the opposite. There is an overabundance of information, but much of it is false, and the result is very similar to the first dark age. This glut or storm bombarding the individual in all its written, oral, and visual forms has led to a New Dark Age. Conspiracy theories run rampant. Some believe in the flat earth theory again. People are admonished for 'not doing their research.' In the early 80s, I could sense this coming. (personal communication)"