Martin Ramirez - Hardcover

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BROOKE DAVIS ANDERSON is director and curator of the Contemporary Center at the American Folk Art Museum. She has organized numerous exhibitions for the museum, most recently "Concrete Kingdom: Sculptures by Nek Chand," cocurated with Lee Kogan and Juliana Driever (2006); "Obsessive Drawing" (2005); and "Ancestry and Innovation: African American Art from the Collection," cocurated with Stacy C. Hollander (2005). As director of the Henry Darger Study Center, Anderson oversees exhibitions and documentation of the museum's extensive Henry Darger archive and has organized several projects from this rare body of material, including a forthcoming exhibition of contemporary artists' responses to Darger's work. She has written and lectured extensively on American art, in particular African American art and the work of contemporary self-taught artists. From 1992 to 1999, Anderson was director of the Diggs Gallery and assistant professor at Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina.

Aus dem Klappentext

Martin Ramirez (1895-1963), the great self-taught draftsman of the twentieth century, left his native Los Altos de Jalisco, Mexico, in 1925 to find work in the United States and support his wife and children back home. Political struggles in Mexico that directly impacted his family and the economic consequences of the Great Depression left him stranded, jobless and homeless, on the streets of 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. Ramirez spent the second half of his life in California mental institutions.

Separated from his homeland, his family, and his friends, and not speaking the language of his adopted country, Ramirez hardly talked to anybody during those thirty-two years. Instead, he began to assemble found bits of paper--candy wrappers, greeting cards, flattened paper cups, hospital supply forms, and book pages, for example--using a self-made glue to create large surfaces for drawing. In the early 1950s, Tarmo Pasto, a visiting professor of psychology and art, saw some of Ramirez works in the hospital ward and recognized their singular artistic value. Pasto not only made Ramirez a subject of his research into mental illness and creativity but also started to supply him with materials and, by organizing public exhibitions, made his artwork accessible to a larger audience.

During the more than five decades since that fortuitous meeting, much has been speculated about Ramirez life and work. His oeuvre, which teems with traditionally Mexican motifs but also references popular American culture of the mid-twentieth century, forms an impressive map of a life lived between two worlds--two worlds in a geographical, cultural, as well as social sense.

The retrospective exhibition "Martin Ramirez" this book accompanies, organized by the American Folk Art Museum in 2007, is the first study to give equal consideration to the biographical, historical, and cultural influences in Ramirez oeuvre, its artistic quality and merit, and its standing in the context of the work of twentieth-century self-taught artists. An interdisciplinary exploration of Ramirez life and complex, multi-layered artwork, it presents a holistic examination of his drawings and collages beyond the boundaries of his diagnosed schizophrenia and his long--and mistakenly--suspected muteness.