Drawing outside the lines

For many self-taught and outsider artists, biography often takes up as much column space as verbiage about the art. Such is the case with Martín Ramírez (1895–1963), whose story is as remarkable as his drawings. Here’s the synopsis: Mexican immigrant gets picked up by California police for being homeless, is institutionalized for 30 years, never sees his family again, and creates more than 300 works of art now considered masterpieces.

“Martín Ramírez” at the Milwaukee Art Museum, organized in conjunction with New York City’s American Folk Art Museum, presents 79 works on paper. Eight of the drawings, however, are unique to this exhibition. Those works are from the collection of Chicago artists Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson, which not only links Ramírez to Chicago (his work first entered the art market via Chicago in 1973), but underscores the city’s historic connection to the field of outsider art.

Ramírez made his drawings at DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn, California, using paper bags and paper scraps collected from garbage cans. With a paste made of spit and oatmeal, he constructed surfaces often upward of seven feet long. He sat on the floor when he worked, and employed a series of repeating lines that cascaded into his motifs of horse and rider, trains and tunnels, and La Purísima Concepción (a version of the Virgin particular to his region of Mexico).

Little was known about Ramírez until recently. Even after ten major exhibitions, “nobody knew who he was,” says Victor Espinosa, who along with his now former wife, Kristin Espinosa, is responsible for filling in the blanks. Victor Espinosa, a Ph.D. sociology candidate at Northwestern University, became fascinated by Ramírez after seeing a show of the outsider’s work in Mexico in 1989. A couple of moves sidetracked the research, but when the Espinosas relocated to Milwaukee in 1999 they picked up where they had left off, after learning that MAM had acquired a few Ramírez drawings. The only “facts” known about Ramírez: He was from Mexico (birth date unknown), died in a California mental hospital, and was mute and a schizophrenic (the latter bits are being questioned today).

Having done fieldwork in Jalisco, a provincial state of Mexico with unique architectural features, Espinosa guessed by the buildings in Ramírez’s drawings that the artist might be from there. The other tip-off was the Virgin (depicted with a snake at her feet, a feature also peculiar to the region), which Ramírez compulsively drew. In time, Espinosa was able to locate birth records and Ramírez’s family.

The fact that no one had bothered to find out much about Ramírez is part of the problem with outsider art, which according to Espinosa, is fond of myths. “Most dealers aren’t interested in going too deep because it will destroy the mystery.”

Ramírez was discovered in the 1950s by Tarmo Pasto, a psychologist who was researching the link between mental illness and creativity. Pasto met Ramírez at DeWitt and saved 300 drawings; he also organized shows, and supplied Ramírez with materials. But despite his humanism, Tarmo failed Ramírez—and art history. “Sometimes good intentions have bad consequences,” Espinosa says. Since Pasto was out to prove his thesis, that the only way to communicate with a schizophrenic was through images, he didn’t try to talk to Ramírez. “He didn’t ask questions, which is the reason we are only speculating now.”

Nutt is responsible for the second discovery of Ramírez. He encountered some Ramírez drawings while teaching at Sacramento State College. He located Pasto and, along with then Chicago gallerist Phylllis Kind, bought most of Pasto’s collection.

When Brooke Davis Anderson, curator at the American Folk Art Museum, met the Espinosas in 2000 after a conference, they came up with plans for this exhibition.

Ramírez’s story is now known; various relatives traveled to New York and Milwaukee to see the show (and no, none own any pieces of Ramírez’s now valuable work).

Pasto stopped collecting in 1957, but Ramírez drew daily until his death in 1963. Pasto also sent many drawings to various museums in hopes of securing exhibitions, and often did not get the work back. Three were discovered in the basement of the Crocker Art Gallery in Sacramento (improperly stored and full of holes). The Guggenheim ended up with ten drawings. Espinosa found a letter in Pasto’s archive in which he told the famed New York museum it needn’t bother to return the drawings as he had plenty of them. Espinosa believes the recent exhibitions will flush other Ramírez works from the woodwork. “Just wait. In the next couple of years more drawings will be coming out.”

It didn’t take that long. An October 29 article in The New York Times reported  a newfound stash of 140 drawings held by the family of a former physician at DeWitt.

“Martín Ramírez” is at the Milwaukee Art Museum through January 6.