The Smithsonian’s American Art Museum has bought Seven Days: Breakfast Tacos by San Antonio artist Chuck Ramirez for their permanent collection.
Chuck Ramirez (1962-2010) Seven Days Series: Breakfast Tacos Conceived in 2003; printed by the Estate in 2012 Edition 4/6 Pigment ink print on archival HAHNEMUHLE Photo Rag Baryta paper 48 x 60”
The photograph will be included in an exhibition, Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art, on view at the American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. from October 25, 2013 to March 2, 2014.
Organized by E. Carmen Ramos, Associate Curator for Latino Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Our America will feature more than seventy works in a range of media, drawn exclusively from the institution’s groundbreaking permanent collection of Latino art. Ramirez’ Breakfast Tacos will be exhibited alongside works by other leading contemporary Latino artists, working in the US from mid-century to the present.
Chuck Ramirez was an artist and designer who lived and worked in San Antonio, Texas. As an artist and graphic designer, Ramirez processed and deconstructed the media world in which he lived. His work employs visual and conceptual techniques found in contemporary advertising and package design. Using typography and digital imaging technology, Ramirez isolated and recontextualized familiar objects and texts to explore the human condition. Always personally relevant, Ramirez explored cultural identity, mortality and consumerism through his photographs and installations. The images in his 1997 series, Coconut, slyly subverted stereotypes of those who cross cultural boundaries. Ramirez resurrected waste—photographing filled garbage bags, dying flowers, and battered, empty piñatas—reflecting on the fleeting nature of human existence while imposing the will to survive.