Martin Ramirez — Outsider

New York City

:One of the most interesting American-based, self-taught artists of the Twentieth Century, Martin Ramirez (1895–1963) created some 300 drawings characterized by aesthetic quality, power and a sense of mystery while confined to a mental institution in California. A gifted draftsman with an eye for spatial manipulation, he employed a variety of images that reflected his exposure to Mexican and US cultures, his restricted environment and his experiences as an impoverished migrant subsisting on the margins of American society. A superstar among outsider artists, Ramirez exemplifies one man's determination to communicate at all costs and in the face of numerous obstacles.

His multilayered work has held a fascination for doctors, art historians and folk art collectors since it came to public attention a half century ago, but until recently much of his life and the meaning of his oeuvre was shrouded in myth and mystery.

"Martin Ramirez," comprising nearly 100 works on paper, includes art never before seen in public, which provides new information and fresh insights into this intriguing man and his art.

The exhibition, organized by Brooke Davis Anderson, curator and director of the American Folk Art Museum's Contemporary Center, will be on view there through April 29. It is the first Ramirez museum exhibition in New York City and his first retrospective in nearly 20 years.

The exhibition seeks to go beyond the conventional characterization of Ramirez as a "schizophrenic artist" to explore the artistic quality and merit of his oeuvre. New scholarly research — biographical, cultural and historical — provides a more complete understanding of Ramirez's biography and how it influenced his artwork. It underscores the richness of the drawings and illuminates characteristic images — animals, horses and riders, Madonnas, trains and tunnels — that inspired them.

A man of deep Catholic faith, Ramirez came from Los Altos de Jalisco in west-central Mexico, where he married, had four children and owned land and a horse. Poverty and the chaotic political situation in Mexico in 1925 — the eve of the Cristero Rebellion (a civil war pitting armed Catholic rebels against the secular national government) — prompted him to leave his family and travel across the border, eventually to northern California, where he worked on the railroad and in mines. By 1931, Depression hard times and despair about the fate of his family in his devastated homeland left Ramirez out of work and homeless.

Unable to communicate in English and apparently disoriented, he was picked up by the police and committed to a state hospital, where he was diagnosed as a catatonic schizophrenic. Trapped inside California's psychiatric system, Ramirez spent more than three decades in mental institutions, hardly talking to anyone. Separated from his homeland, family and friends, his isolation was exacerbated because he did not speak the language of his adopted country. Contrary to prior accounts, there is no documented evidence that he was either mute or deaf, but he certainly spoke little because of the language barrier.

By the time he was transferred in 1948 to De Witt State Hospital in Auburn, where he spent the remainder of his life, Ramirez had begun to draw, but much of his work was discarded by hospital staff. At the outset, he drew on paper bags or scraps of paper glued together with a paste made of oatmeal and his own saliva. Ramirez spread the resulting paper, ranging from very small to very large in size, on the floor in his hospital ward and went to work. He tried to save the drawings by hiding them rolled up in his jacket and under his mattress.