Memory, migration and the startling art of Martín Ramírez
The most important thing I can tell you about the story of Martín Ramírez is that its survival is miraculous.
Born into an impoverished farming family in a rural province of Mexico, Ramírez joined that country’s first wave of economic- driven migration to the United States in 1925. He worked his way to California, only to find his prospects dimmed by the Great Depression. When the San Joaquin County police picked him up on the street in 1931, it set in motion the then- simple process of having him committed to a mental institution for the rest of his life. That was the last episode of his public life in any country.
And yet. During the course of his decades- long confinement, first in Stockton State Hospital and then in the DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn ( Placer County), Ramírez began to draw and to paint, using whatever materials were available to him. After many years, his work gained the notice of a visiting psychologist, then visiting art students and finally, art dealers. These people began collecting his work, exhibiting it and — much to their delight — building a collector’s market for it. This, too, was miraculous. The 20th century was the era when art became professionalized and academic — an institution rather than a practice. Nothing about Ramírez fit any of the acceptable definitions, especially because he stopped speaking regularly — to anyone — after his first few years in detention. Art critics have never known how to talk about him.
“He was possessed by a demon of self- expression that drove him to acts of artistic creation far beyond our expectations of a hopeless paranoid schizophrenic,” reads one of the more ambitious of a long list of startlingly patronizing reviews from Ramírez’s first exhibitions, starting in the 1950s. ( This one was by Robert Glauber in Skyline magazine in 1973.)
But the public has always loved his pieces. A 2007 show at the American Folk Art Museum in New York set attendance records. One of his earliest exhibitions, at the Mills College Art Gallery in Oakland in 1954, was one of the best- attended shows of that decade.
“The public interest was so tremendous that they and I felt the show I have of art by a completely regressed Schizophrenic should have wider showing,” wrote Tarmo Pasto, the California psychologist who first championed Ramírez’s work, in a 1954 letter to a Washington gallerist during the Mills College show.
That letter was dug up by Victor Espinosa, who teaches at Ohio State University and is the author of “Martín Ramírez: Framing His Life and Art,” the first book that can be properly called a biography of this remarkable man.
Espinosa spent 10 years working on this book, mostly at his own expense, which brings me to another miracle about Ramírez: He’s attracted a small but passionate group of admirers and legacy- keepers, those who understand the intuitive importance of his transnational experience and the startling, shardlike forms he used to reflect the many fragmentations of his life. ( Full disclosure: I like to think I’m among them, having written about Ramírez in the past and, likely, will again many times in the future.)
“I’ve experienced many surprises over the years of doing research into his life,” Espinosa told
me. Everything about Ramírez presented a challenge — the fact that he moved between countries, the fact that few of his immediate family members were literate, the fact that he was institutionalized via a dubious process, the fact that he stopped speaking to authorities for the last decades of his life, the fact that his original champions failed to do due diligence on who he was and what he was doing in this country, the fact that he died penniless and is buried in an unmarked grave near the now longclosed DeWitt hospital.
All of those facts are, of course, why it was so important for Espinosa to write this book.
In addition to talking to Ramírez’s family members and situating him in a historical context, Espinosa makes the argument that Ramírez’s stunning abstract linear forms and the repetition of his favorite images ( horses and horse riders, Madonnas and trains) were a reflection not of his mental condition but of his memories of life in Mexico.
“The formal characteristics of all his art were affected by his experiences of displacement and migration,” Espinosa said.
And because the story of Ramírez is increasingly the story of the world, it’s all the more reason for us to pay attention to him.