Martín Ramírez: Framing His Life and Art

In a “sociological biography,” Espinosa (The Dilemma of Return) focuses on transnational cultural displacement in his exploration of the life and work of visual artist Martín Ramírez. Ramírez was born in Mexico and relocated to the U.S. as a migrant worker in 1925. In 1931 he was arrested and was institutionalized for the rest of his life, away from his wife and children. Espinosa writes that Ramírez frequently drew and created collages using a concoction of his own saliva and potatoes as glue, noting that he created a body of work in which images from his life in Mexico are rendered in a visual structure that singularly employs both modernist and traditional techniques. His work, according to Espinosa, was celebrated by the art world first as an example of psychotic art and later as outsider art. The book explores Ramírez’s artistic career by reframing his practice in the context of California psychiatric institutions and their treatment of migrants, examining how his work was appropriated by the art market. Elegant in both prose and argument, Espinosa’s book untangles Ramírez’s work from the conditions within which it has been defined in order to celebrate the radical complexities of the artist’s aesthetics and the power of recognizing him as “an example of resistance, survival, and artistic agency from the perspective of a subaltern subjectivity.” Illus. [em](Nov.) [/em]