tony ramos

Artist Statement

Coming from the Marcell Duchamp, Allan Kaprow school of “Art As Life '' I have always been reluctant to write an “Artist Statement”. For the past 22 years I have had all an artist needs, a large studio in the South of France undisturbed by the constant unending conversation about race which pervades American culture. Nina Simone understood, James Baldwin understood, as have thousands of other Americans who left the U.S. for France.

That quiet peace left me with the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. “Enough is enough” I thought, at 77 years of age it is time to return to the engaged politics of my youth. So I began a series of paintings to tell a portion of the history and pain and suffering created by the simple writing of laws to justify the evils of racism.

Artist Biography

Tony Ramos, a Cape Verdean American from East Providence was born in 1944 in Providence, Rhode Island, and lives in the South of France. He studied painting at Southern Illinois University and received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, where he was graduate assistant to Allan Kaprow. He has received a NAtioanl endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and an Aspen Fellowship from the Aspen Institute, among other awards. In the 1970’s, Ramos was a video consultant for the United Nations and the National Council of Churches. He lived in Paris in the 1980’s, where he was a professor at the American Center and oversaw the first television cabling of Paris. During the 1970’s and 1980’s, Ramos traveled widely in Europe, Africa, China, and the Middle East. He recorded video during the end of Portugal's colonial rule of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, in Tehran during the 1980 hostage crisis, and in Beijing just prior to the Tiananmen Square massacre. He taught at Rhode Island School of Design, New York University, and the University of California at San Diego, among others. In the late 1980’s he turned to painting as his primary medium. He has exhibited his paintings at numerous international venues, including the American Jazz Museum and Bruce R Watkins Cultural Center, Kansas City, Biennale de Dakar, Senegal; and Galerie du Dragon, Paris among others.

Ramos' video works have been shown internationally including at the Pasadena Art Museum, California (1973); Musee d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (1974); Whitney Museum of American Art (1975) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1992) among others. Recent screenings and exhibitions of Ramos’ early video work include Light Industry in New York (2010); Circa 1971 : Early Video & Film from the EAI Archive at Dia: Beacon (2011-2012); The Embodied Vision: Performance for the Camera at the Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporanea do Chiado in Lisbon (2014); Anthony Ramos: Video et apres at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2014), and Tell It Like It Is: Black Independents in New York, 1968-1986 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York (2015). (EAI)