MEET THE ARTIST: Paul Ramírez Jonas
Meet the artist: Paul Ramírez Jonas
Paul Ramírez Jonas is a well-established artist and educator whose work focuses on the power of interdisciplinary and socially-engaged art, print media, public art, and sculpture. His selected solo exhibitions have been featured at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston (Houston, Texas); Museo Jumex (Mexico City, Mexico); The New Museum (New York City, New York); Pinacoteca do Estado (Sao Paulo, Brazil); The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield, Connecticut); and The Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art (Austin, Texas). One of his most ambitious and popular works includes the Key to the City project (2010) presented by Creative Time in cooperation with the City of New York.
Paul is part of a group of six visionary artists making history on the National Mall this year. Beyond Granite’s pilot exhibition will be the first curated outdoor exhibition in the history of the Mall, featuring original works from Paul and seven other artists. The exhibition’s central question asks, “What stories remain untold on the National Mall?” and will expand our imagination about what America’s Front Yard can be for our communities and country.
Over a career spanning twenty-five years, Ramírez Jonas has created works that range from large-scale public installations and monumental sculptures to intimate drawings, performances and videos. Through his practice, he seeks to challenge the definitions of art and the public and to engineer active audience participation and exchange.
His project Key to the City involved 20,000 participants and centered around a key as a vehicle for exploring social contracts pertaining to trust, access, and belonging. Keys have featured repeatedly in his work as symbols of access and exclusion, as well as public and private ownership. Multiples based on everyday objects such as coins also are a recurring motif allowing him to question notions of value, circulation and societal rituals or behaviors.
Speaking about Beyond Granite on the National Mall, Paul said…
Photo by AJ Mitchell for the Trust for the National Mall
“It is has become comfortable for me to sit in the periphery imagining and presenting alternatives. Creating a monument on the National Mall, even if temporary, means embracing the discomfort of working and checking in on what is actually possible at the very symbolic center of our nation.”
- Paul Ramírez Jonas
He is a Professor, Art Department Chair, Director of Graduate Studies at the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning at Cornell University and is represented by the Galeria Nara Roesler in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and New York. He was born in Pomona, California in 1965 and raised in Honduras. Educated at Brown University (BA, 1987) and Rhode Island School of Design (MFA, 1989). He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
About Beyond Granite
Photo by Monument Lab
Beyond Granite, funded by the Mellon Foundation, invites visionary artists to create special commemorative exhibits, performances, and installations on the National Mall and throughout the District of Columbia that will expand the public's imagination and understanding and create a more a more inclusive, equitable, and representative process for commemoration on the National Mall – and beyond.
”Pulling Together,” the inaugural exhibition of Beyond Granite, will feature installations and exhibits or prototype monuments, on the National Mall and in Washington, DC from leading contemporary artists that respond to a central curatorial question: What stories remain untold on the National Mall?
The Trust for the National Mall is honored to be working with the Mellon Foundation and its partners The National Capitol Planning Commission and the National Park Service to bring this new series to life to tell the fuller American story in the commemorative landscape.