Chuck Ramirez

Ramirez was a dynamic force in the San Antonio art community before a fatal bicycle accident cut short his promising career at age forty-eight. Having survived his HIV+ status and open-heart surgery, the artist was keenly aware of his mortality and worked, as well as lived, prodigiously. Ramirez began his career as a graphic designer, developing store-brand package design for H.E.B., a supermarket chain in Texas, for many years while also doing pro bono work for Blue Star Contemporary Art Center in San Antonio, with which he was involved from its inception in 1986. Using his product-design background as a springboard, Ramirez began making photographs of shrink-wrapped toys and other commercial objects, exhibiting and selling them at San Angel Folk Art Gallery in 1995. Within a year, another body of work titled Santos was included in the exhibition Synthesis and Subversion: A Latino Direction in San Antonio Art at the University of Texas-San Antonio Art Gallery. The artist’s photographs frequently feature a single, mass-produced object isolated against a white background. Series include plastic shopping bags from Europe, abandoned flower arrangements from hospitals, “portraits” using the contents of purses and suitcases, wading pools filled with plastic toys, Mexican sweets with a bite taken out of them, battered piñatas, trash bags, cuts of meat, lists of food ingredients, in addition to the Candy Tray series (2002-2003) from which the proposed piece is drawn. Using the technique of sharp-focus product photography, printing the objects larger-than-life, and face-mounting them to glossy plastic, the artist amps up the allure of these mundane items of popular culture, making them shiny and delicious (and sometimes all the more vacant in contrast to that glitter).

Among Ramirez’s primary themes were his identity as a Mexican American and as an HIV+ gay man. Photographs of coconuts, piñatas, food, and plastic toys begin to address the former while his images and installations dealing with medical issues, dying flower arrangements, and empty candy boxes speak to the latter. One image that appeared alongside articles about his death and thereby took on added poignancy is Whatacup, his photograph of a lone orange-and-white striped Whataburger soda cup displaying the company’s anti-litter message, “When I am empty please dispose of me properly.” Ramirez’s playful, colorful creations draw in viewers and then pack a punch. He uses iconic objects to critique the fickle consumerism of North American mainstream culture but also as a metaphor for the transience and frailty of life.

Ramirez’s work was exhibited frequently in the United States, Mexico, and Europe at venues including the Bronx Museum of Contemporary Art in New York; El Portal del Arte Contemporáneo (ARCO) in Madrid; and Centro de la Imagen and Galeria Lamm in Mexico City. He was selected for an ArtPace residency in 2001 by Jerome Sans, an independent curator and co-director of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. A solo exhibition of his photographs, titled Chuck Ramirez: Deeply Superficial, was organized at DePauw University’s Richard E. Peeler Art Center in 2006. In 2012, one of his photographs was acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum for its upcoming exhibition Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art. The artist’s estate is represented by Ruiz-Healy Art in San Antonio. (Ware 2012)