Chuck Ramirez Career Retrospective Spans Venues, Decades and Distance

Here's the simplified bio: Chuck Ramirez was a San Antonio-born artist who went to Jefferson High School, studied art and graphic design at San Antonio College, and worked as a graphic designer for H-E-B and San Antonio Magazine. He left the 9-to-5 in order to launch himself into the contemporary art world. As a gay, HIV-positive Latino man, Ramirez, alongside artists Alejandro Díaz and Franco Mondini Ruiz, spearheaded a queer-lensed, rasquache-informed new wave of humor-laced, graphically arresting art. He quickly became one of the city’s most loved artists and celebrated personalities, and a deeply involved and welcoming member of the creative community, before dying an untimely death seven years ago at the age of 48 as the result of a bicycle accident.
If there’s one aspect of the Chuck Ramirez narrative that gallerist Patricia Ruiz-Healy would like to disrupt, though, it’s that ascent from humble graphic design career into the contemporary art world. “It’s too easy,” she says, “too dismissive. His art transcends this classification.” She feels there’s a whiff of the remedial about this storyline, a faulty reckoning with the inherent vision he brought to his commercial work, and an over-emphasis on the chops it’s assumed he gained from it. She’s concerned, too, that his reputation as a local celebrity eclipses the true power of his oeuvre.