Tony Ramos was born in 1944. He holds a Fine arts degree from Southern Illinois University and a Masters degree from California Institute of the Arts. Among his awards, he has been the recipient of a Rhode Island Committe for the Humanities grant, a Rockefeller Foundation Grant and is an Aspen Fellow at the Aspen Institute, Colorado. He has been a visiting Professor of the arts at Rhode Island School of Design, San Francisco Art Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, University of California, San Diego, American Center, Paris, France and University of Paris VIII. In the 1970s He was a video consultant for the United Nations and the National Council of Chuches.
Selected video exhibitions
1973 Pasadena Art Museum, California
1973 Lowe Art Museum, Boston, Massachusetts
1974 Art now 74, Kennedy Center, Washington DC
1974 Confrontation "Art Vidéo", Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris
1975 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
1975 Sao Paulo Biennale, Sao Paulo, Brazil
1975 Whitney Museum Young Film Makers series, New-York
1979 Holly Soloman Gallery, New-York
1981 Centre Audio Visuel, Maison de la Culture, Rennes, France
1982 Musée des Beaux-arts, Bourges, France
1991 Brooklyn Studio Museum
1992 Museum of Modern Art, New-York
1992 San Francisco Art Institute
Selected painting exhibitions
1993 Manhattan Friends of the Arts, Manhattan, New York
1997 Porter Troupe Gallery, La Jolla, California
1999 Edgemar Center of the Arts, Santa Monica, California
2000 UFA Gallery, Manhattan, New York
2000 Musée Boribana, Biennale de Dakar, Dakar, Sénégal
2001 Espace libre, l'Ile sur Sorgue, France
2003 CCH Pounder Gallery, Los Angeles, California
2005 The Jazz Museum, Kansas City, Kansas
2006 Bruce Watkins State Museum, Kansas City, Kansas
2007 « 100ème anniversaire de la mort de Cézanne », Aix-en-Provence
2008 Galerie du Dragon, Paris.
Vidéo par Richard Goulis, 2010
San Francisco, College Art Association conference 1971
From left, Jim Melcert standing, seated Bruce Nauman, Emmett Williams, Wayne Taylor, painting professor at University of Wisconsin, Madison, Tony Ramos, Lowell Darling, Robert Cumming. Allan Kaprow was moderating from the from row, unseen.
Credit:Fred Escher
About Anthony Ramos , by Alice Thomson, Art critic, Kansas City Star, Kansas.
"The life and work of Anthony Ramos intersect with key moments and figures in American art and history. Ramos was born in 1944 in Providence, Rhode Island, home to a large immigrant population from Cape Verde, a former Portuguese colony that was once a trading center for african slaves.
Ramos first studied painting at the Southern Ilinois University in Carbondale in the early 1960s. He met artist Frederick Brown, with whom he developed a lifelong friendship.He also met Alan Kaprow, the inventor of the influential 60s performance/events khown as "Happenings" came to lecture at school.
Later in the decade, Ramos joined Kaprow in New-York, where he participated in Happenings and in events put on by the avant-garde Fluxus group, which included Nam Jun Paik, Alice Knowles and Yoko Ono.
In 1970, he joined Kaprow at the California Institute of Arts as his graduate assistant and began experimenting with video. In 1975, the Rhode Island Committee for Humanities put up 10,000 Usd for a portable reel to reel camera that Ramos took to Cape Verde where he filmed the end of Portyguese colonisation. In 1977, Ramos created what is perhaps his best known video work, "About media", examining media coverage of President Jimmy Carter's declaration of amnesty for Vietnam War draft resisters. He followed up with another imporatnt video exposing media distorsions, "Nor was this all by any means"(1978), one of the first works to challenge mass culture portrayals of African Americans.
Ramos spent much of the 1980s in Paris, where he was a video director at the American Center and taught at the University of Paris. In 1988, he moved to Topanga Canyon, California, and returned to painting. In 2001, he moved to Aix-en-Provence, where he is now renovating an old fortified farmhouse into a studio."
About the serie of satellite images . Ramos, inspired by satellite images of the universe, creates the essence of deep space through the painting. His interest in mathematical concepts motivated him to embellish these painted surfaces with geometric symbols marks and arrows. The marks became more structured when he moved to Topanga Canyon, CA, in the early 90's. The canyon's rustic environment brought him closer to nature and his art reflected this. The geometric markings became mandala-like patterns of circles and squares, which were executed in meticulously placed dots over the gestural painted surfaces.
In the late 1990's Ramos began to add human images to his paintings. He began the Slave/Indian series of paintings using a black profile along with the text of the ancient racist laws. The paintings Ramos states, "are about the cause rather than the effect of racism." In early 2000, in France, he continues the painting techniques of his previous works, but the pieces become much smaller in size and including series where smaller squares could be combined in several varieties to construct a larger work. |
