Memory Portals: Martín Ramírez

Assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the Ohio State University-Newark Víctor M. Espinosa is the author of El dilema del retorno: Migración, género y pertenencia en un contexto transnacional (El Colegio de Michoacán 1998) and Martín Ramírez: Framing His Life and Art (University of Texas Press 2015). His most recent publication, Performances of Suffering in Latin American Migration: Heroes, Martyrs and Saints (Palgrave Macmillan 2020) is a collaborative book with OSU performance studies scholar Ana Elena Puga that combines historical, sociological analysis, and a theater/performance studies lens to understand how migrant suffering is framed and staged (by migrants, activists, artists, and advocates) to claim human rights for undocumented migrants.

American art dealer Frank Maresca is co-founder of Ricco/Maresca Gallery in New York City. A long-term advocate of Self-Taught, Folk, and Outsider Art, he has championed and showcased the work of artists creating on the margins of the art-historical mainstream for over 35 years. Through many gallery exhibits, museum collaborations, philanthropic work, and key publications (including American Primitive, 1988, Bill Traylor: His Art, His Life, 1991, American Self-Taught, 1993, and American Vernacular, 2002), Maresca has sought to blur the lines that have traditionally separated conventional categories in visual art and vernacular art. He is currently on the advisory board of Raw Vision Magazine, Fountain House Gallery, Intuit in Chicago, and the Art Dealers Association of America.

Independent critic, curator, and writer Lyle Rexer is the author of The Critical Eye: 15 Pictures to Understand Photography (Intellect Ltd 2019), The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography (Aperture 2009), and Photography’s Antiquarian Avant-Garde: The New Wave in Old Processes, (Harry N. Abrams 2002) and others. He has published hundreds of catalog essays and articles on art, architecture, and photography and contributed to such publications as The New York Times, Harper’s, Art in America, among others. He has lectured at many institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Yale University, among others, and he teaches in both the graduate and undergraduate programs at SVA.