Ramiro Gomez


Ramiro Gomez is a Mexican-American artist who lives in West Hollywood, California. His artwork addresses social justice issues, focusing specifically on topics of immigration, race, and labor. While his work demonstrates a variety of styles and media, including canvas, cardboard, magazine, and paper, his message remains to bring the Latino domestic and menial workforce to the forefront of public discourse. Gomez works with California-based art dealer, Charlie James Gallery, exhibiting his pieces in installations and exhibitions nationwide. He and his art have also been recognized and promoted by news media, giving the Latino community a platform to voice their story. Much of his work highlights the efforts of often unseen laborers who maintain landscapes and produce luxury products.

Early life

Born in 1986 in San Bernardino, California, Ramiro Gomez Jr. is the son of two formerly-undocumented Mexican immigrants. "Jay", the nickname Gomez adopted in his childhood to distinguish himself from his father, Ramiro Gomez Sr., was born into a working-class family. Both parents, hailing from different parts of the Mexican countryside west of Mexico City and south of Guadalajara, left for the United States in the 1970s. His mother and father arrived in California separately and without legal documentation. They married one year before Gomez's arrival in 1985, and later became US citizens following the births of their two daughters. Gomez spent his childhood admiring the tireless work of his mother Maria Elena, a school custodian, and his father Ramiro Sr., a Costco truck driver. While his parents worked, Gomez's grandmother took care of him and his sisters, assuming a vital role in his upbringing and providing him with unwavering support as he came to terms with his sexuality.
Throughout his childhood, Gomez grappled with his sexual identity, understanding that his attraction to other boys was disapproved of by his traditional Mexican family. Following the initial shock, his family came to support his homosexuality. Shortly after graduating high school, Gomez met photographer and filmmaker David Feldman. The pair are now married and live in West Hollywood. Feldman plays a critical role in the documentation and preservation process of Gomez's work. Before his cardboard cutouts are either stolen, thrown out, or destroyed, Feldman photographs the artwork in its intended position and location. These images are then hung in Charlie James Gallery exhibitions, as well as others nationwide.

Education and early career

Throughout his childhood, Gomez found school assignments and class tedious. Nevertheless, he excelled in the art studio, eventually resulting in a partial scholarship to the California Institute of the Arts Due to a combination of financial struggles and the passing of his grandmother, Gomez dropped out of CalArts after one year. In order to make a living, Gomez secured a private nanny job with a Los Angeles family, which he began in September 2009. He held this job for two years and it provided him with the stability he had lacked previously. Not only did it provide a steady income and a reliable living situation, but it also allowed Gomez to work alongside people whose backgrounds resembled his, reminding him of his family's Latino immigrant roots.
During these two years when Gomez cared for the family's children, he began his first artistic series, Domestic Scenes, which documented his daily experiences and observations of the other workers in the home and the neighborhood. As the children napped, Gomez would retreat to his room so that he could paint loose representations of his fellow workers, depicting male workers in their outdoor sphere tending to the lawn and pool and female housekeepers cleaning the interiors.

Artistic career

Early works

While working as a nanny, Gomez would look at issues of Luxe, Dwell, Architectural Digest, and Elle Décor displayed in his employer's home. Upon flipping through the pages, Gomez found the images devoid of the workers who maintained the advertised domestic lifestyle. This realization prompted him to begin his series, Domestic Scenes'', in which he superimposes domestic workers onto advertisements in high-end magazines to reinsert an image of the Latino community into the public consciousness. Gomez depicts the figures of housekeepers, nannies, and gardeners completing their daily duties in the Chicano rasquache style, as a way to both, acknowledge and document their lives and labor.
Gomez gives each of his workers a Latino name such as Maria, Lupita, or Carmen but renders the figures with loose and rough strokes that blur any identifiable facial features, which writer Katharine Schwab states "reframes the David Hockney paintings and glossy magazine advertisements he takes for inspiration, putting the lives of California’s near-invisible and individually disposable workers front and center." In addition to their names, most of his figures are presented with dark skin and brown hair to fully represent the archetype of a Latino domestic worker. The series acts as a photo study, documenting the figures that advertisements have erased from the narrative. These images earned Gomez recognition within the art world, resulting in his partnership with the California-based art dealer Charlie James Gallery.

My Cousins and My Aunts without my Tio Carlos

Ramiro Gomez painted this to demonstrate his personal family’s struggle after his uncle was deported in 2018. In the painting, “a man-shaped hole in a family portrait marks the spot where a graduate’s father should have been”.
Gomez leaves the figures in his portrait faceless, but right next to the graduate is an empty space while the rest of the family is standing next to each other

David Hockney

Gomez has stated that he sees David Hockney as a personal hero and an influence for many of his works, as well as helping him to openly embrace his sexuality. Hockney is known for creating idealistic depictions of Los Angeles, California. His modernist style rendered the splendor of Los Angeles residents, homes and pop culture. Gomez sought to revise Hockney's compositions by including the implied characters who work to maintain the depicted beauty as well as to portray dark-skinned workers, diverting the focus of the piece from luxury to labor. Gomez reimagined Hockney's A Bigger Splash, with his version, No Splash, which he completed in 2014. While Gomez's reproduction does not depict Hockney's large splash in the foreground, it does include two faceless workers in the background who clean windows and rake the pool. Gomez's painting is currently in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, San Diego's permanent collection.

Cardboard cutouts

Gomez crosses mediums to cardboard to represent Latino gardeners, custodians, and workers in his series entitled Cut-Outs. In this series, Gomez’s main objective was "to slow people down, to have them double-take, to make them take notice and see" the cardboard figures that he placed along the sidewalks, on lawns, and against buildings. Gomez paints his loose renderings of people on life-size cardboard cutouts, which he collects from the dumpsters behind a Best Buy at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and La Brea Avenue. While the destinations and arrangements for each figure are carefully thought out and executed, Gomez knows that the cutouts’ lives are short-lived as they are either stolen, thrown out or destroyed. According to Gomez, the disposability of the cardboard figures acts as commentary on the perceived replaceability of domestic and maintenance workers. Gomez's husband, photographer David Feldman, photographs images of the cutouts for exhibitions nationwide. In 2013, the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA offered Gomez his first solo exhibition, entitled Luxury Interrupted, to present images of his cutouts.
Gomez displays most of his cutouts throughout the lawns, street corners, and playgrounds of Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, which he says is intended to force passersby to recognize who maintains the city and cares for its children. In 2012, Gomez planted four cardboard Latino workers on the hedge of actor George Clooney’s home prior to a fundraiser event that President Obama was to attend. One of the figures displayed a sign that read "We are all American". His intent was to demonstrate the political dimensions of his art by both representing and humanizing his subjects. According to Katharine Schwab, Gomez uses the power and accessibility of street art to force society to recognize who maintains city and cares for its children. Gomez explains that "it was strange; actual humans involved in their labor had become invisible to most people, but the image of a human, there, in the middle of your day, and not at some museum or gallery, but there in the middle of your path, somehow that registered."
In 2017, LACMA announced the inclusion of Gomez's works from his series, Cut-Outs, in their permanent collection.

Recent works

In 2017, artist Rafa Esparza invited Gomez to the Whitney Biennial in New York to participate in his exhibition, Figure Ground: Beyond the White Field. While working at the Whitney, Gomez observed the custodians, security guards, and staff members, documenting images on his phone so that he could later create cardboard cutouts of these subjects. In the week prior to the Biennial, he gifted his subjects with their cardboard representations, giving them recognition for their labor.
Also in 2017, Gomez's work was part of the group exhibition, Home---So Different, So Appealing, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Both the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, partnered with LACMA for this exhibition. The exhibit served as part of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, an initiative that seeks to promote an appreciation and exploration of Latino and Latin American Art in Los Angeles.

Exhibitions

Gomez's work has been exhibited at: LACMA, the Museum of Latin American Art, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the Denver Art Museum, MCA San Diego, MFA Houston, the Torrance Art Museum, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and many others. His story and his work have been discussed in a variety of news outlets, including: The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times Magazine, Hyperallergic, the Los Angeles Times, The Huffington Post, and on NPR and CNN among others.

Awards: