|
 TM
Mexican Artist Emerges as a 20th Century Master
The work of Martín Ramírez, a 20th century self-taught
master will be on view at the American Folk Art Museum from January 23 through
April 29, 2007. The museum exhibition in New York City is the first major
retrospective in almost twenty years to showcase the complex and multi-layered
work of this artist.
The exhibition will feature over 90 works on paper drawn from public and private
collections in the U.S. and abroad, some of which have never been on public
view. The exhibition will be labelled in English and Spanish and can also be
seen at the Milwaukee Art Museum from October 6, 2007 through January 6, 2008.
Ramírez (1895-1963) created nearly 300 drawings of remarkable visual clarity and
expressive power within the confines of DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn,
California, where he resided from 1948 to 1963. Over the years Ramírez has been
categorized primarily as a "schizophrenic artist." The exhibition attempts to go
beyond this narrow diagnosis of mental illness to consider the artistic quality
and merit of Ramírez's artwork.
Short Biography
Very little had been known about Ramírez until Victor and
Kristin Espinosa, trained sociologists, spent twenty years researching his life.
They traced the artist's family, the social and cultural environment of his life
in Mexico, his journey to the U.S., his experience as a migrant worker, and his
final years as an artist in California asylums. Their valuable findings allow
for a fresh re-examination and more complete understanding of Ramírez's artwork.
Born in Los Altos de Jalisco in west-central Mexico, a deeply Catholic area,
Ramírez married, had four children, owned land and a horse. In 1925 the
devastating political situation in Mexico caused Ramirez to leave his family and
travel north with friends, eventually to California where he found work on the
railroads. The consequences of the Depression as well as his despair over the
Cristero Rebellion in his homeland left him jobless and homeless on the streets
of northern California in 1931. Unable to communicate in English and apparently
confused, he was picked up by the police and committed to Stockton State
Hospital, where he was diagnosed as a catatonic schizophrenic. Trapped inside
the psychiatric system of California, Ramírez spent thirty-two years in mental
institutions, hardly talking to anyone. Separated from his homeland, his family,
and his friends, his isolation was compounded because he did not speak the
language of his adopted country. There is no documented evidence that he was
either mute or deaf, contrary to accounts from the last 50 years that continued
to promote this notion.
In 1948 Ramírez was transferred to DeWitt State Hospital, where, in the early
1950s Tarmo Pasto, a visiting professor of psychology and art, saw some of
Ramírez's drawings in the hospital and recognized their artistic significance.
Ramírez became the subject of Pasto's research into the relationship between
mental illness and creativity and he supplied Ramírez with art materials. Prior
to Dr. Pasto's entrance into Ramírez's artistic life, his drawings were
discarded by the hospital staff, who believed they were infected with his
tuberculosis. Ramírez had tried to save the drawings by hiding them rolled up in
his jacket and under his mattress. Pasto collected Ramírez's drawings and
organized several public exhibitions in the 1950s, making the artwork available
to a larger audience. Among the contemporary artists who saw his work at that
time were Wayne Thiebaud, and later Jim Nutt.
Ramírez neither dated or signed his drawings and he was never interviewed about
his work, so it is difficult to accurately trace his stylistic development.
However, the artist developed a coherent vocabulary of motifs, forms, and shapes
that he repeatedly explored. These drawings and collages have been likened to
"visual diaries of Ramírez's life".
Imagery and Process: The Art of Martín Ramírez
"Ramírez's art teems with "traditionally Mexican motifs,
but equally references popular American culture of the twentieth century." It is
an "impressive map of a life shaped by immigration, poverty,
institutionalization, and art" states Brooke Anderson, curator of the museum's
Contemporary Center. "Facile and inventive draftsmanship. spatial manipulations,
and a diverse repertoire of images. reveal an adventurous artist (exploring).
endless variations on his themes" continues Ms. Anderson.
The exhibition highlights four of Ramírez's most distinctive themes-the horse
and rider, trains in tunnels, religious figures, and landscapes-and the ways in
which they are realized through his unique art making process. Four scholars
with different areas of expertise were invited to comment on one work from each
of these themes. Thus, a more fully dimensional portrait of this important,
under-recognized artist emerges.
Sometime in the late 1930s or early 1940s Ramírez began to fashion large
surfaces for drawing from found bits of paper. Candy wrappers, greeting cards,
flattened paper cups, hospital supply forms, book pages, and, later, long rolls
of hospital bed paper were assembled with glue made from potato, bread, and
saliva. The resulting paper, ranging in size from several inches up to 12 feet,
was spread on the floor in the hospital ward. Ramírez also created his own
pigment by crushing crayons and colored pencils in a home-made oatmeal pot. With
a matchstick as a stylus, he used the smashed medium to draw endless variations
on his favorite themes. Other self-taught artists such as James Castle and
Aloïse Corbaz devised similar techniques.
The horse and rider, or jinete, is one of Ramírez's primary subjects. The jinete
imagery makes reference to the Cristero Rebellion in Mexico as well the popular
Western films that Ramírez most likely saw in the cinema, on television, and in
magazine ads. Positioned in the center of the paper within a stage-like
proscenium, the jinete and its architectural setting are subtly altered from
drawing to drawing. By skilfully employing changes in the construction of the
framing device, shading, line, perspective, color, texture, and scale, Ramírez
creates a surprising diversity in the entire group. The reverberating line
emphasizes the tension between the geometric stage-set and the organic figure of
the horse and rider. Ramírez often cut illustrations from popular magazines to
use as collage elements, such as the head of a 1950s girl humorously applied
onto a figure in one of the horse and rider drawings. This technique recalls the
collage elements in some of Adolf Wölfli's works.
Ramírez had an ongoing fascination with trains, perhaps referencing his
experience leaving his life in Mexico in a long train journey. As the second
most frequently recurring subject in his art, the leitmotif of the train and
tunnel is treated in an endless variety of ways. Ramirez created intricate
graphic compositions organized in horizontal formats in closed, boxed-in
settings. The hypnotic repetition of line underscores a sense of urgency,
movement, and mystery. The controlled, concentric lines also describe orifices
and voids while other forms suggest a mollusk or fingerprint such as the shapes
in Untitled (Cat, Bird Tunnel) and the Untitled (Tunnel with Man, Woman and
Dog).
The majestic drawings of Madonnas are rooted in the Mexico of Ramírez's birth.
This particular imagery, sometimes misidentified as the Statue of Liberty, was
inspired by Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception in Ramírez's home parish in
Capilla de Milpillas. The large-scale vertical works in the exhibition depict an
heroic Madonna with her arms raised, standing on a globe with a snake swirling
at her feet. The iconography in other drawings is both traditional Mexican and
Catholic, but enriched with idiosyncratic elements such as a blond Madonna
dressed in a fancy shirt with red stripes.
The scroll-like landscapes in the exhibition contain elements of representation
and abstraction. One spectacular 9-foot long drawing, made from several sheets
of paper pasted together, is a sophisticated, singular work of art. A panorama
that uses both drawn and collage elements, it includes Mexican images of
churches and towns interspersed with animals, horse, rider, tunnels, cars, and
is signed with a prominent, decorative calligraphic letter "R," perhaps an
unconventional signature.
Weekend Symposium
"Culture in Context: Self-Taught Artists in the
Twenty-First Century" is a two-day symposium planned for April 27-28, 2007, the
last weekend of the Martín Ramírez exhibition. Internationally known scholars
and a broad range of art historians, artists, and critics will focus on the
state of scholarship and research about contemporary self-taught artists and
their work. For information and to register, please e-mail
education@folkartmuseum.org.
www.folkartmuseum.org
Edited by Sarah Wilman
Back to TravelLady Magazine |
|