The Armory Show: New York City

This year The Armory Show will focus its special programming on Latinx and Latin American art. Selected by Carla Acevedo-Yates, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Ramirez’ exhibition Long-Term Survivor  will be recreated for the first time in its entirety since the original 1999 exhibition in The Hudson Showroom at Artpace in San Antonio, Texas.

“Chuck’s 1999 exhibit, Long-Term Survivor, was perhaps one of the most personal series that he created. Ramirez belonged to what would be considered the second generation of gay man that tested positive for HIV, the generation after the epidemic that began to be detected in the 1980’s. Having been diagnosed with HIV in 1990, Ramirez struggled with treatments until the late ‘90s, during which time protease inhibitors and other post-AZT cocktail treatments began lengthening the lives of the positive."

- Patricia Ruiz-Healy, Ph. D., "Chuck Ramirez : A Minimalist Maximalist (1962-2010)," Chuck Ramirez: Metaphorical Portraits, Ruiz-Healy Art, 2020.

"In the piece titled Rabbit Pearl Ramirez uses the image of a female vibrator, altering it until it has become visually intangible. The vibrator has been digitally transformed into a wafty pink fuzzy microbe looking object that could be representative of the virus itself. Often times in science and art, the closer we examine a thing, the more abstract it becomes. Ramirez solicits the audience through the use of factual moments that direct specific ideas. For example, Ramirez uses these fetish objects to portray sexual desires. They conjure a specific feeling and empathy."

- “Chuck Ramirez” by David McCall Freeman, 1999 Review of Long-Term Survivor exhibit.

Chuck Ramirez was a major force in the San Antonio art community before his untimely death in a 2010 cycling accident. A 2002 Artpace artist in residence, Ramirez’ work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. In 2012, The Smithsonian American Art Museum purchased Ramirez’ limited edition large-format photograph, Seven Days: Breakfast Tacos, for the institution’s permanent collection. During the winter of 2017, the McNay Art Museum exhibited the first significant survey of his work in the exhibition Chuck Ramirez: All This and Heaven Too. Ramirez’ work has been recently acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY and the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX.

As an artist and art director, Ramirez processed and deconstructed the media world in which he lived. Using typography and digital imaging technology, Ramirez isolates and recontextualizes familiar objects and texts to explore the human condition. Always personally relevant, Ramirez explored cultural identity, mortality, and consumerism through his photographs and installations; his work subverted stereotypes of those who cross cultural boundaries. Ramirez resurrects waste—photographing filled garbage bags, dying flowers, and battered, empty piñatas—reflecting on the fleeting nature of human existence. Working with materials and images that were part of his daily life—a life impacted by being HIV positive—he transformed the language and power of advertising into a call for action and compassion, expression, and self-actualization.