Artist Information
Artist
Jose RamirezRole
PainterDate made
2001 - 2001Time Period
PostmodernNotes
Jose Ramirez (b. 1967) is an artist, teacher, and urban gardener. His paintings, mined from the depth of his Mexican-American heritage, are rooted in the metropolitan fabric of Los Angeles, his family’s home since the 1920s. Raised in El Sereno, with brief stints in Arizona and the San Francisco Bay Area, Ramirez has devoted his art to capturing the unique socio-political, economic, and cultural conditions that shape Latino life in the Southland. Deeply influenced by Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros (Los Tres Grandes) and by the populist Chicano Art Movement of the 1960s, Ramirez’s work features an array of mysterious places and characters—humble workers, ancient warriors, gangsters, laborers, innocent children, and mystical creatures that stir the imagination. They are seen against lush tropical gardens or Downtown’s jagged skyline, like ancient sentinels, reflecting the city’s unique Mexican history and experience.