Beginnings in Berkeley
When Triple Golden Bear Ramon Ramirez ’93 & ’97 looks back on the moment he chose his path, the memory is both vivid and improbable. As an architecture student at UC Berkeley, he was accustomed to assignments that sent him into the field to observe form and space. One semester, a professor in a Chicano Studies Art History course asked the class to visit SFMOMA to see CARA: Chicano Art, Resistance, and Affirmation. The show was expansive, filled with voices that had long been overlooked, and it struck him with the force of inevitability. Around the same time, he was assigned Lorna Dee Cervantes’s Emplumada, a slim collection of poetry that spoke to lineage, loss, and resilience with startling intimacy.
“I decided right there and then to be a Chicanx artist,” Ramirez recalls. It was a choice that came even as he was immersed in architecture studios, drawing elevations and memorizing construction systems. But conviction, once found, rarely obeys curriculum. From that moment on, painting became his true vocation.
The City as Muse
Ramirez is Los Angeles born and raised, and the city has never loosened its grip on him. He describes Los Angeles as his “primary muse.” Anyone who has driven through the city at dusk, where the light hangs thick and orange over freeways that loop without end, can see what he means. For Ramirez, Los Angeles is a restless companion: sprawling, layered, defiant.
His architectural training helps explain why his canvases read less like static scenes and more like structures alive with movement. Space is not arranged for observation but designed for experience. A painting may hold the discipline of drafting, but it exhales with atmosphere. In this sense, Ramirez’s work translates architectural principles into visual poetry.
Training, Influence, and Rigor
Berkeley equipped him not just with degrees, a B.A., an M.A., and an M.Arch., but with habits of mind that continue to guide his studio practice. He speaks with reverence of Professor Dubovsky from the College of Environmental Design, whose approach to drawing revolutionized how he saw. “He changed my life forever,” Ramirez says.
That training is visible in his compositions: draftsmanship that anchors bold gestures, a disciplined eye willing to risk intuition. Where some artists may privilege instinct, Ramirez tempers it with structure, and where architects may privilege logic, he counters with emotion. The result is work that appears simultaneously engineered and felt.
Milestones and Recognition
Over the decades, Ramirez’s paintings have traveled widely. His works have been exhibited at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, the Carnegie Art Museum, the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, Loyola Marymount University, and the Monterey Museum of Art, among others. His work is included in Contemporary Chicana/Chicano Artists from the Bilingual Press, and he has appeared in journals, books, and on ABC7’s VISTA LA.
One milestone remains singular in his memory: a solo exhibition at the Carnegie Art Museum where forty of his paintings were shown together. To stand inside a gallery surrounded by so much of his work was, for him, both pride and revelation. It felt like a seminar with his own archive, a chance to see his progression not as isolated canvases but as a conversation stretching across years.
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Themes and Turning Points
Ramirez’s art returns repeatedly to themes of identity, belonging, and urban life. Los Angeles, in all its contradictions, is the stage where these themes play out. One turning point in his career came when he recognized that authenticity demanded scale. “My brain tells me to start painting smaller,” he admits, “but that’s not authentic. That’s what’s in my heart.”
The large canvases are not mere indulgence; they are, in his view, the only truthful response to the magnitude of his subject. A city that refuses to sit still demands paintings that expand to hold it.
Heritage and Responsibility
Ramirez is candid about his heritage. His parents were from Mexico, and his identity as a Chicanx artist was shaped by his upbringing in Los Angeles. For him, heritage is a framework, it informs not only imagery and style, but also purpose.
“Art is a leading element in the preservation of our democracy,” he says. For him, the canvas is both mirror and megaphone, a space where marginalized voices can be centered and cultural narratives reclaimed.
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Art as Necessity
The pandemic underscored this belief in unexpected ways. As life contracted to screens, friends began requesting to use his paintings as Zoom backdrops. It was not vanity, they wanted the paintings visible behind them as they spoke to colleagues, students, or communities. The canvases, in this strange mediated space, became declarations.
“It taught me art is an essential of human expression,” Ramirez reflects. His friends weren’t adorning their lives with pretty images; they were insisting on identity, values, and voice. Art, in this context, was not luxury but necessity, a way to say what could not otherwise be said.
Passing the Torch
Asked what advice he would offer current Cal students or young alums pursuing creative careers, Ramirez does not romanticize the struggle. Education matters, he says, because it expands what is possible. Persistence matters because doubt never disappears. And authenticity matters above all. “Find your authentic voice and let it be heard.”
He speaks with the authority of someone who has built a career in the arts, sustaining himself through painting. The admission is rare, because artists often hedge about their livelihood. For Ramirez, it is not bragging but testimony that the path, though difficult, can be walked.
Looking Forward
By his own count, Ramirez has completed around five hundred paintings. He imagines another two decades of work ahead. “Get back to me in 20 years,” he says with a laugh. Though the promise may be embedded in a joke, he will still be painting.
This long horizon reflects not only ambition but devotion. Painting is not a project with an end date; it is the steady work of a lifetime, a practice as necessary as breath.
A Candle from Berkeley
Near the end of our exchange, Ramirez returns to Berkeley, the place where conviction took root. “Berkeley has always been a light,” he says, “and I’m just a small candle.”
The metaphor feels both humble and true. A candle may be small, but it is steady, resilient in gusts. This October 4th, when fellow alum Lucy Tarin opens her wine shop to a showcase of his work, the Cal community will see that flame again, bright, insistent, carrying both memory and momentum.
EVENT DETAILS – Thirsty Bears: Hispanic Heritage Wine Fiesta.
Ramirez paints a city that refuses to sit still, and in doing so, he insists on what art must always do: make space for voices, claim space for stories, and light the way forward.
Photo Credits: Ramon Ramirez
