One Piece at a Time: Martin Ramirez, “Courtyard 1954″

By Mutope Johnson
September 24, 2012
ThirdCoast Digest

Martín Ramírez was born in Jalisco, Mexico, in 1895. He migrated to the United States in 1925 to find work on the California Railroad and in the California mines.

Since his death in 1963, Ramírez was labeled as one of the greatest Mexican self-taught artist of the 20th century, but ironically it is not his first label. Ramírez, out of work and homeless, was picked up by police and committed to a psychiatric asylum after being diagnosed as a catatonic schizophrenic. Ramírez lived out the rest of his days in two institutions, the Stockton State Hospital and the DeWitt State Hospital in California, and in those places created the lion’s share of his work. Later labels for Ramírez: Folk Artist and Outsider Artist’

Ramírez’s profoundly creative characteristics are evident in Courtyard 1954. It features a train and track, prominent motifs in his work, make their way across the upper portion of his composition, amid the intense, obsessive horizontal and parallel line patterns typical of his work. Ramírez’s wonderfully crafted form and pictorial spaces dominate the work.

Read the full article at ThirdCoast Digest.