Ray Abeyta was an American painter of Basque descent. He was born Raymond Martìn Abeyta, on November 13, 1956, in the small village of Santa Cruz in the Española Valley, New Mexico. Abeyta's paintings are a hybrid of ancient and contemporary Latino subject matter in the Cuzco School style of Madonna painting, lowrider culture, New Mexican traditional retablo painting, and representations of the colonialist encounters between Europeans and Mesoamericans.
Early life
Abeyta grew up in the small village of Santa Cruz near the town of Española, New Mexico. As a child, his family lived in several trailers. He was raised in the lowrider culture of Northern New Mexico.
Abeyta moved from New Mexico to New York in 1986, and settled into a warehouse studio in the North Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. In 1989 he met his future wife, Alyssa Jill Glantz, a business woman and community organizer, whom he married in 1992. They had two children, Elija and Izzy. They established the bar and entertainment venue Union Pool, Hotel Delmano and other venues in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He was affectionately known as the honorary Mayor of Williamsburg. Abeyta was a vintage automobile and motorcycle enthusiast, and owned and restored a 1956 Ford F100pickup truck and a 1968 Triumph motorcycle. He was the co-owner of Works Engineering, a motorcycle repair shop in Brooklyn.
Professional career
The iconography of Abeyta's paintings has been described as a mixture of "colonial, baroque, indigenous and pop culture" references. Abeyta's work was the subject of numerous one person exhibitions, including major exhibitions at the Museum of New Mexico, and the National Hispanic Cultural Center Art Museum. His work is held in the permanent collections of these institutions. His work is a significant contribution to the Southwest, and was included in the exhibition, Painting the Divine: Images of Mary in the New World at the New Mexico History Museum. He was influenced by Spanish Baroque painting, Mexican retablo and ex voto paintings as well as other vernacular visual sources such as codexes, maps and nautical charts. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including the San Francisco Mexican Museum, the Rotunda Gallery among others. Abeyta's paintings are represented by the Owings Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Monograph
A monograph on his work, Cuentos y Encuentros: Paintings by Ray Martín Abeyta, was published in 2003 by the Museum of New Mexico Press.
In 1995 and again in 1996, Abeyta received grants from the Art Matters Foundation. In 2005, Abeyta was awarded with a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation.
