About the artist
1895–1963, born in Jalisco, Mexico; later lived and worked in Auburn, CaliforniaBiographical details about the great Mexican-American artist Martín Ramírez remain scant at best. Born in 1895 in rural Jalisco, Mexico, he worked as a sharecropper, a rancher, and a laundryman until 1925, when crippling debt forced him to leave his wife and four children and migrate north to find work in the United States. The next several years found his homeland consumed by the religious and political strife of the pro-Catholic, anti-Constitution Cristero Rebellion, which may have prevented or discouraged Ramírez’s return. After eight shadowy years as un norteño, during which he might have worked on the railroad, police took him into custody in San Joaquin, California, in 1931. Unable to speak English, he was diagnosed as an incurably catatonic schizophrenic and confined to Stockton State Hospital; in 1948, he was transferred to DeWitt State Hospital near Sacramento, where he remained until his death. Although there are indications that he also drew as a younger man, his approximately 300 surviving works all date to the last fifteen years of his life, when he rarely spoke. Championed and supported by the psychologist Dr. Tarmo Pasto, Ramírez’s work was discovered in hospital storage bins after his death by Chicago artist Jim Nutt and gallerist Phyllis Kind, who arranged for its exhibition and sale. Since then, it has exerted a profound influence on subsequent generations of artists, including the Chicago Imagists.
Exhibiting a kind of enigmatic iconographic vocabulary, Ramírez’s deliriously lovely drawings limn deep, vertiginous spaces through rhythmic repetition, disorienting perspectival shifts, and stagy composition. A mythic presence suffuses the animal, human, landscape, and abstract aspects of the work, all hemmed in by vibratory channels and warrens. A master of line and compositional control, Ramírez used matchsticks to paint with melted crayons and found pigments on paper fragments glued together with saliva. He also occasionally included collage elements. Recurring motifs in the work include the mounted and armed caballero—Ramírez was fond of horses and apparently quite an equestrian back in Mexico—the Virgin Mary, trains and tunnels, and cars. Vernacular Mexican and American cultural themes and visual tropes, both nostalgic and resolutely modern, combine in a body of sensuous, dream-like images. Martín Ramírez’s work can be found in major collections worldwide, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the American Folk Art Museum, in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.
—Brendan Greaves
Above: Tarmo Pasto and Martín Ramírez at De Witt State Hospital, c. 1950. Photo: Courtesy Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York.
Bibliography
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