Today we’d like to introduce you to Catya Martinez-Gloria.
Hi Catya, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I’m a Bryan-College Station native, but at 18, I packed up and moved across the country to Savannah, Georgia, to study fashion and textiles at the Savannah College of Art and Design. It was a deeply creative and formative season of my life. I was surrounded by people who were constantly making, experimenting, asking questions, and dreaming up things that didn’t exist yet. I think that was when I first discovered just how much can happen when people are simply given the space and permission to be imaginative.
Since then, creativity—and especially textiles—has taken me on a bit of a winding journey! I’ve spent time in Guatemala supporting Indigenous artisans through fair-trade fashion work, lived in Austin working alongside the founder of an independent ethical fashion brand, and eventually hopped across the pond to England, where I spent a year earning my master’s degree in Textile Sustainability. Along the way, I fell more and more in love with the stories held within the things we make: who made them, what they’re made from, where those materials came from, and how making things can connect us to one another.
And, somewhat sweetly, all of that wandering eventually led me right back home! Today, I’m back in Bryan-College Station, dividing my time between working with a female-owned clothing brand that breathes new life into repurposed textiles, and growing Open Studio BCS—a creative space where locals can gather around a table, learn something new, make things with their hands, and hopefully rediscover a little bit of their own creativity along the way.
There’s something full-circle about building Open Studio here. A lot of who I’ve become creatively started in those early years of simply having the room to play, experiment, get things wrong, and discover what I loved. It’s a gift getting to create little pockets of that same feeling in my hometown.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Smooth might not be the word I’d use! For starters, no one in my immediate family had pursued a career in fashion or anything traditionally considered a creative profession, so there wasn’t exactly a roadmap for me to follow. Although, looking back, I can see there was a creative thread running through my family all along. My grandfather was a monument maker, and my grandmother owns a flower shop—two livelihoods that, when I think about it, require a pretty healthy dose of creativity, craftsmanship, and problem-solving every day.
Still, navigating art school and eventually the fashion and textile world felt like pretty unfamiliar terrain. There was a lot I had to figure out as I went—what opportunities existed, how to find them, and even what a sustainable creative career could look like for me. There’s something both exciting and daunting about realizing there isn’t one obvious path in front of you.
Then, midway through college, COVID hit. When you go to art school and study something as tactile as fabric and clothing, you quickly realize how much you rely on being able to touch, make, experiment, and learn alongside other people. Suddenly trying to translate that experience through a screen was…interesting, to say the least! It wasn’t quite the art school experience I had imagined, but it taught me a lot about flexibility and making do with what was in front of me.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Open Studio BCS is a creative space for the Bryan-College Station community to learn, make, commune, and share through hands-on, project-based workshops. What that looks like can take a lot of different forms—which is part of the fun!
We’ve hosted gatherings ranging from multi-week printmaking workshops and lantern nights in local shopping districts to coffee shop pop-ups and cultural art nights that bring together traditional processes and local cuisine. We’ve stepped inside people’s homes for celebrations, giving friends a different way to gather around the table, and welcomed local artists into our programming to share the things they know and love with the community. Some gatherings are more instruction-led, where everyone is learning a new process together, while others are free-form and simply give people an excuse to sit around a table, work with their hands, and meet someone new.
However, Open Studio actually began much more simply! At art school, an “open studio” was a space for creative co-working—a room where everyone might be working on something completely different, but we were making alongside one another. When I moved back to Bryan-College Station, I missed that feeling. So the earliest version of Open Studio was simply an invitation to gather, bring whatever you were working on, and make in the company of other people. I started calling them BYOP—Bring Your Own Project—nights, and they still have a place on our calendar today.
As our little community grew, people began asking for opportunities to learn and make something together. That opened the door for workshops, collaborations, pop-ups, and all sorts of creative experiments I couldn’t have imagined when we started. In a funny way, the word “open” has taken on a new meaning for me because of that. Open Studio isn’t only about an open workspace anymore; it’s about an open invitation.
So many people wander into our events and tell me some version of, “I’m not creative,” or “I’m not an artist.” Those are often the people I’m most excited to see walk through the door. I don’t believe creativity belongs exclusively to people who went to art school or have mastered a particular craft. Most times you just need a table, some materials, a little guidance, and permission to play.
It’s most fun watching people surprise themselves. I love seeing them arrive a little unsure, get completely absorbed in making something, and leave carrying something they made with their own two hands. The finished object is wonderful, of course, but the shared experience around the table—the conversations, curiosity, mistakes, experimentation, and little sparks of confidence—is really what Open Studio is about.
We’d love to hear about how you think about risk taking?
I think pursuing anything creative as a career comes with a certain amount of risk! There are a lot of “what ifs” that tag along with it. What if I invest all of this time and money and it doesn’t lead anywhere? What if there’s a more practical and predictable way I could be spending my time, energy, or resources? Investing in supplies, education, travel, and opportunities to keep learning has required me to get comfortable with some of those questions without always having a clear answer.
Honestly, Open Studio has felt like an ongoing exercise in that. Every workshop begins as a neat idea, and then at some point I have to decide that I believe in it enough to put real time, energy, and money behind it. I have to buy the materials, approach the venue, reserve the space, put the event out into the world—and hope people want to come.
It feels a bit like inviting everyone you know to your birthday party and then wondering if you’ll be sitting there alone with the cake! But time and time again, I’ve been surprised by people’s willingness to show up, try something unfamiliar, and make alongside one another.
I don’t think risk has ever looked like fearlessness for me. It’s looked more like learning to move forward without needing to see the whole path first. There’s a lot of faith involved in creating anything—being faithful with the idea and resources in front of you, loosening your grip on the outcome, and trusting that something meaningful can come from simply taking the next step. There’s vulnerability in that, but I think that’s also what leaves room to be surprised.
Open Studio has taught me that sometimes you have to set the table before you know who is going to sit around it. So far, people keep pulling up chairs!
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/openstudiobcs/
