In the hope of finding employment that could support his family, Martín Ramírez, of Mexican origin, emigrated to the United States at the age of 30. In Northern California, he worked in the mines and on railroad construction. But the Cristero War then broke out in Mexico: his property was destroyed, he lost the animals he had entrusted to his family, with whom he definitively fell out following a misunderstanding.
Already subject to psychological disorders, he was committed in 1931 to the Stockton State psychiatric hospital, from which he escaped several times, each time returning of his own accord. He began drawing there in 1935. Suffering from tuberculosis, he was transferred in 1948 to DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn. It was thanks to the intervention of the artist and psychologist Tarmo Pasto that his production was preserved.
Ramírez drew on pieces of salvaged paper that he assembled himself, on which he used a colored paste made from pencil, charcoal, fruit juice, shoe polish, saliva, and sometimes his own expectorations. Both narrative and abstract, his work delineates—while diverting them—representations of his culture (Mexican bandit, Madonna, forest animals, trains, etc.), with a definite taste for ornamentation. The deer (the name of his former property) and the cowboy are emblematic figures. The frame, often highly worked, theatricalizes the drawn space. The whole amounts to approximately four hundred and fifty drawings.
Ramírez’s work was shown for the first time at Sacramento State College in 1969, at the joint initiative of the artist Jim Nutt and Tarmo Pasto, both professors at that institution.