Adriana Raquel Ramirez’s self-portrait portrays her in a large, black, luxury gown — not because she generally wears such attire, but because it symbolizes what was desirable, but also financially out of reach while growing up. In the background, familiar images: her grandmother’s apartment, a taco truck logo, and the car that remained in the driveway for years because her father never had the money to fix.
These tangible memories juxtaposed with the gown sparks the question: what makes us who we are? The self-portrait, painted with oil sticks and pastel, also offers a potential response: For the truest portraits, our longings, dreams, and what could have been, have to be included alongside the material realities of what was.
Ramirez’s work focuses on portraits that engage questions of identity. For a while, Ramirez was resistant to integrating her Mexican heritage in the creative process, and was wary of creating work that seemed “too Mexican,” when she didn’t want to be pigeonholed. While studying at Berkeley, Ramirez said she felt as if she didn’t know the “right” way to do or say something in a manner that would meld seamlessly with those around her.
Over time, her views changed. She changed. What once felt like pushing her heritage aside to blend in began to feel like erasure. It is now her Mexican heritage, in all its complexity as someone of mixed background, that she is embracing. “It’s messy,” she says. But what is honest often is.
Ramirez grew up in the East Bay, yet has always felt at home in the Mission District, with its strong Latinx roots. “Comfortable, safe, and connected,” are the descriptors that first come to mind for her when walking 24th St. and surrounding corridors. “The sights, smells, sounds, everything,” it is hundreds of details tangible and not, which make up the feel of a neighborhood which is home not just to individuals, but where the sense of community spans generations, where it is about family and culture in the most robust senses of the words.
Ramirez’s artistic process has gone through multiple phases. Studying at Berkeley, she decided to major in rhetoric instead of art in order to further develop the concepts she wanted to engage through her artistic expression. During the pandemic, she moved in with her mom and sister to an apartment in the Richmond area. But when her family moved out, and it was a challenging time to find a new housemate due to the pandemic, Ramirez instead covered the walls with raw canvas and began to paint. When they were filled, she gessoed over them and started again. Through iteration after iteration, she began to develop a stronger sense of her style, message, and distinctive creative process.
Her art invites us to reconsider how we define identity — our own and others.. “People love to define,” said Ramirez, but identity is fluid and complex. As soon as we think we understand, it is almost assured that we don’t. Her art work invites us to look more closely at how we define someone at an individual level, but also connects to broader questions of how we identify place and culture.
Her work doesn’t tell anyone what to replace their assumptions with, but part of the message is to expose the very process of assumption making. Ramirez comments on the often-fixed nature of our own perceptions, which can fail to allow room for differences in interpretation. Even if an identity fits on a given day, “the next day it could be something new.” Ramirez talks about a similar phenomenon in our proclivity to identify with certain material things — a seeming paradox in that there can be a great joy in associating ourselves with things in our home contexts, “things we connect to and find beauty within.” And at the same time, we as individuals, and the things in our contexts, are alive and constantly changing.
Ramirez’s work has ranged from highly abstract to more realist, and she is now looking to fuse the styles. It seems what is most true often comes from the place where the lines aren’t always clean and neat, but where there is an interplay of colors, emotions, and simultaneous realities. It lies in the taco trucks that were real, the luxury black dresses that weren’t and the car that never did get fixed.
Adriana Raquel Ramirez’s work was recently featured in the Juan R. Fuentes Gallery at Acción Latina, the nonprofit home of the El Tecolote newsroom. Find upcoming gallery shows at eltecolote.org/art-shows.