Martin ramirez biography

Born in Jalisco, Mexico, Martín Ramírez is widely known as one of the preeminent self-taught masters of the 20th Century.
Martín Ramírez (January 30, 1895 – February 17, 1963) was a self-taught artist who spent most of his adult life institutionalized in California mental.
Martín Ramírez came to the United States from Mexico as a young man.

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Past Exhibition

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UNTITLED (Three VW Vans)
Martín Ramírez (1895–1963)
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UNTITLED (Train)
Martín Ramírez (1895–1963)
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UNTITLED (Horse and Rider)
Martín Ramírez (1895–1963)
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UNTITLED (Horse and Rider)
Martín Ramírez (1895–1963)

Martín Ramírez

January 23–May 13, 2007

American Folk Art Museum
2 Lincoln Square, New York City
Free Admission
Open Today 11:30-6:00 pm

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Mexican, 20th century.
Born 1895, Jalisco, Mexico; died 1963, Auburn, California.

Born in Tepatilan, Jalisco, Mexico in 1895, Martín Ramírez was a rancher and a family man, until poverty and political violence drove him to California in search of migrant work in 1925. Like many Mexican immigrants, he suffered great hardship, but his story is anything but typical. In 1931 Ramírez was diagnosed with catatonic schizophrenia and committed to state hospitals, first in Stockton, and then at the DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn. He began to draw in the 1930s, using unlikely materials culled from hospital supplies. Erroneously labeled a chronic mute, Ramírez flourished as an artist until his death in 1963, producing an impressive body of over 300 large-scale, mixed-media drawings. This oeuvre would have been lost if not for the advocacy Dr. Tarmo Pasto, a Sacramento psychiatrist who met the artist after his move to DeWitt. Pasto offered him encouragement, some supplies, and later archived and exhibited his work.

Ramírez’s creativ

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Martín Ramírez: Framing His Life and Art

Martín Ramírez, a Mexican migrant worker and psychiatric patient without formal artistic training, has been hailed by leading New York art critics as one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists. His work has been exhibited alongside masters such as José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, Salvador Dalí, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, and Joan Miró. A landmark exhibition of Ramírez’s work at the American Folk Art Museum in 2007 broke attendance records and garnered praise from major media, including the New York Times, New Yorker, and Village Voice.

Martín Ramírez offers the first sustained look at the life and critical reception of this acclaimed artist. Víctor Espinosa challenges the stereotype of outsider art as an indecipherable enigma by delving into Ramírez’s biography and showing how he transformed memories of his life in Mexico, as well as his experiences of displacement and seclusion in the United Sta