When Martin Ramirez died in 1963 at the age of 68, he had spent most of his adult life in California psychiatric hospitals. Now, a new retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles is helping to ensure this self-taught artist receives the recognition he deserves.
Born in Mexico in 1895, acute poverty forced him to leave his pregnant wife and three children in 1925 to find work in the United States. After the economic crash, he lost his job and stayed in California as a homeless vagrant. For reasons that are still unclear, he had severed all ties with his family in Mexico and, in 1931, was eventually picked up by police. After a brief psychiatric consultation conducted entirely in English (which he did not speak), Ramirez was diagnosed as schizophrenic and committed to the California mental health system where he remained for the rest of his life.
According to Victor Espinosa, author of the book, “Martín Ramírez: Framing His Life and Art, little is known about what happened during that initial assessment except that he kept saying, "Me no loco” (“I am not crazy”). Still, the schizophrenia diagnosis was impossible to defend against. “With this kind of diagnosis, it’s impossible to leave the institution,” Espinosa said in a recent interview. “Ramírez didn’t have anyone on his side to question the diagnosis, to do anything.” He continues to question whether Martin was schizophrenic at all or if he was simply a victim of the often impersonal psychiatric hospital system and hospital staff who failed to take the time to understand him.
After first being held in the Stockton State Hospital in Stockton, California, Martin was later transferred to another state hospital near Sacramento. It was in these hospitals that he taught himself to draw though he had no access to canvas or other art tools. Instead he used crayons, brown paper bags, and whatever other spare paper he could salvage. He often glued these smaller pieces of paper together using a paste made from saliva and potatoes. Inspired by memories of his native Mexico, Ramirez created thousands of drawings of religious images (especially Madonnas), cowboys, and fields of concentric lines that appear to resemble fields and other decorative patterns. Of these drawings, only 500 are believed to have survived.
Martin Ramirez' art might have gone completely unnoticed had it not been discovered by a visiting professor who studied art made by psychiatric patients. After becoming interested in the drawings, Tarmo Pasto helped organize the first formal art show featuring Ramirez' art at the E.B. Crocker Art Gallery in Sacramento, California, in 1952. Still, the show simply presented the art as the work of an anonymous psychiatric patient and Martin largely remained unknown until well after his death.
In recent years, there has been a renewed fascination with what Martin Ramirez managed to achieve during his lifetime. It was only after Victor Espinosa published his book in 2000 that Martin Ramirez' family first became aware of his growing reputation as an artist. A subsequent lawsuit gave Ramirez' twenty grandchildren control over his artwork though the ownership of many of the pieces he created during his lifetime remain in dispute. Despite the legal battles, many of Ramirez' major works are now in museums such as the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York city. In 2007, the American Folk Art Museum in New York city held the first major retrospective dedicated to Ramirez in more than 20 years
According to Frank Maresca, co-owner of the Ricco/Maresca Gallery in New York which now represents the estate for Ramirez’s 20 grandchildren, the price for Martin Ramirez' artwork is currently in the $500,000 range and the price may increase as more galleries begin showing work by Latinx artists. Ironically, none of the major museums in Mexico have any of his artwork in their collections and no immediate plans to purchase any either.
In the meantime, Martin Ramirez has recently been featured in a set of five commemorative stamps issued by the U.S. Postal Service in 2015. No other Mexican artist aside from Frida Kahlo has ever been honoured this way.
Comments