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USA
West
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Auburn, CA
Martin Ramirez
1895-1963
Drawings (pencil, pen, marker, etc.)
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Information:
One of the self-taught masters of twentieth-century art, Martín Ramírez created some three hundred artworks of remarkable visual clarity and expressive power within the confines of DeWitt State Hospital, in Auburn, California, where he resided for the last fifteen years of his life. Ramírez’s complexly structured works are characterized by skillful and inventive draftsmanship and extraordinary spatial manipulations. The artist employs a diverse repertoire of imagery, fusing elements of Mexican and American culture, the environment of confinement, and his experience as a Mexican living in poverty and exile in the United States.
Martín Ramírez (1895–1963) left his native Mexico in 1925 with the aim of finding work in the United States and supporting his wife and children back home in Jalisco. Political and religious struggles in Mexico that directly affected the welfare of his family, as well as the economic consequences of the Great Depression, left him homeless and without work on the streets in northern California in 1931. Unable to communicate in English and apparently confused, he was soon picked up by the police and committed to a psychiatric hospital, where he would eventually be diagnosed as a catatonic schizophrenic. Ramírez spent the second half of his life in a succession of mental institutions in California.
During those thirty-two years, Ramírez hardly spoke to anyone. However, some time in the mid-1930s, he began to draw. In the early 1950s, Tarmo Pasto, a visiting professor of psychology and art at Sacramento State University, saw some of Ramírez’s drawings in the ward at DeWitt State Hospital and recognized their singular artistic value. Pasto not only made Ramírez a subject of his research into mental illness and creativity but also started to supply him with materials, collect his drawings, and, by organizing public exhibitions, introduce his artwork to the public.
During the more than five decades since the fortuitous meeting between Pasto and Ramírez, much has been speculated about the artist’s life and work. His oeuvre forms an impressive map of a life shaped by immigration, poverty, institutionalization, and most of all art. Migration and memory seem to factor strongly in every image. His compositions document his life experiences; favored images of Mexican Madonnas, animals, cowboys, trains, and landscapes merge with scenes of American culture. Ramírez never seemed to tire of his preferred topics, yet within his limited set of subjects he demonstrates an amazing range of expression. While his singularly identifiable figures, forms, line, and palette reveal an exacting and highly defined vocabulary, they also show Ramírez to be an adventurous artist, exhibiting remarkably creative explorations through endless variations on his themes.
Madonnas
The cult and representation of the Madonna is a constant in Mexican religious art and popular expression. Whether for institutional, domestic, or personal use, Virgins depicted in many forms abound—in paintings, sculptures, ex-votos, prints, tarjetas (holy cards), medals, and even tattoos on the skin. Roman Catholicism in Mexico is a fusion of indigenous and European belief systems and traditions. Depending on ethnicity, cultural region, social class, and rural or urban context, Mexican culture articulates this fusion dynamically.
—Victor Zamudio-Taylor
Landscapes
Martín Ramírez’s entire body of work could be seen as a series of landscapes, or maps, or fragments of maps that narrate the drama of his life: his migratory and cultural odyssey between the traditional rural world of his homeland in Los Altos de Jalisco and the modernity of northern California in the first half of the twentieth century. In some of his maps Ramírez constructed an alternate world without borders, sometimes connected by trains running through tunnels, where his idealized rural world coexists without contradiction alongside modern buildings, highways, and automobiles. This drawing could be seen as an attempt to portray the most significant cultural contexts that marked his life: his hometown in Mexico and the psychiatric hospital in California, where he lived the second part of his life.
—Víctor M. Espinosa and Kristin E. Espinosa
Horse and Riders
The figure of horse and rider, or jinete, is perhaps the subject most frequently drawn by Martín Ramírez. In the more than eighty jinete drawings in his oeuvre, the primary subject is framed in a boxlike room strongly suggestive of a stage. The artist uses this structural device not just to contain but to valorize his subject. The construction of the stage is subtly altered from drawing to drawing with changes to the shading, line, perspective, color, texture, and scale, creating a surprising diversity in the series. This technique recalls the paintings of folk artist Morris Hirshfield (1872–1946) as well as the modernist Joseph Stella (1877–1946), who treated his renderings of the Brooklyn Bridge in much the same manner.
—Brooke Davis Anderson
Trains and Tunnels
Martín Ramírez had a deep, ongoing fascination with trains, which, after horseback riders, are the most frequently recurring subject in his art. His work is full of long trains emerging from mountains, slithering snakelike over long tracks, crossing a dark abyss over bridges, or running through tunnels that connect Jalisco and California—the two worlds in which Ramírez lived.
—Víctor M. Espinosa and Kristin E. Espinosa
Biographical information from Brooke Davis Anderson, Curator, American Folk Art Museum and the Milwaukee Museum of Art web site.
Images are from "Folk Art: Magazine Of The Museum Of American Folk Art" - Winter, 1995,
and the New York Times web site
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Bibliography:
Museums, etc.
Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Collection, Williamsburg, VA
ABCD Collection, Paris
American Folk Art Museum, NY
Anthony Petullo Collection, Milwaukee, WI
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
American Folk Art Museum, New York, New York
Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI
Reference
"The Artist Outsider" Hall and Metcalf, 1994
"The Clarion", Winter, 1986
"Folk Art" Vol 20, No 4, 1995-6
"The Heart of Creation", exhibit catalog, 1985
"Raw Vision", No 6, 1992
"Museum of American Folk Art Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century American Folk Art and Artists" by Chuck and Jan Rosenak, Abbeville Press, New York, 1990.
"20th Century American Folk, Self Taught, and Outsider Art" by Betty-Carol Sellen, Cynthia J. Johnson, Neal-Schuman Publishers, New York, 1993..
"Folk Art: Magazine Of The Museum Of American Folk Art" - Winter, 1995.
"Contemporary American Folk Art - A Collector's Guide" Chuck and Jan Rosenak, Abbeville Press, 1996.
"Self-Taught Artists of the 20th Century", exhibit catalog, 1998
"Self Taught, Outsider, and Folk Art—A guide to American Artists, Locations and Resources" by Betty-Carol Sellen with Cynthia J. Johnson, 2000.
"The Intuitive Eye, The Mendelsohn Collection" by Ricco/Maresca Gallery, 2000.
"Let it Shine: Self-Taught Art from the T. Marshall Hahn Collection" by Lynne E. Spriggs, Joanne Cubbs, Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, Susan Mitchell Crawley, Michael E. Shapiro and Peter Harholdt, organized by the High Museum of Art, 2001.
"50 Classic Outsiders", Raw Vision Sourcebook, 2002"
"American Self-Taught Art: An Illustrated Analysis of 20th Century Artists and Trends with 1,319 Capsule Biographies" by Florence Laffal and Julius Laffal, 2003.
"Wos Up Man?" Selections from the Joseph D. and Janet M. Sheen Collection of Self-taught Art" Palmer Museum of Art, 2005.
"Martin Ramirez," by Brooke Davis Anderson, American Folk Art Museum, New York, published by Marquand Books, Inc., 2007.
"Vernacular Visionaries: International Outsider Art" by Annie Carlano, Caterina Gemma Brenzoni, and Susan Brown McGreevy, Yale University Press, 2003. |
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