Anthony Ramos (artist)

Anthony Ramos is an American video artist, performance artist and painter. He was born in 1944 in Providence, Rhode Island, and lives in the South of France.

Education, Awards and Early Carrier

Before he received an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts he had studied painting at Southern Illinois University. He was a graduate assistant to Allan Kaprow. Ramos served an 18-month prison sentence for draft evasion. "His 1977 video About Media, [...] is an incisive deconstruction of television news. It documents an interview Ramos gave to news reporter Gabe Pressman on the subject of Ramos's eighteen-month prison term for draft evasion during the Vietnam War. Ramos appropriates the interview, contrasting the unedited interview footage with the final televised news report, exposing the artifice of television news."https://www.facebook.com/events/158699254145920/ Early in his carrier he received a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and an Aspen Fellowship from the Aspen Institute. In the 1970s Ramos was a video consultant for the United Nations and the National Council of Churches. He lived in Paris in the 1980s, where he was a Professor at the American Center and oversaw the first television cabling of Paris. During the 1970s and 1980s, Ramos traveled widely in Europe, Africa, China and the Middle East. He documented the end of Portugal's colonial rule of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. He was in Teheran during the 1980 Iran hostage crisis. In 1989 he was in Beijing just prior to the Tiananmen Square massacre. "Ramos used video as a tool for breaking down mass mediated "truth" and as means of cultural documentation. "In my tapes I attempt to develop a different perception of events... The information tells one story but it is not developed as a linear narrative."

Exhibitions and Screenings of Video Work

Ramos' pioneering video works have been shown at the

• Pasadena Art Museum, California (1973)
• Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1974)
• Whitney Museum of American Art (1975)
• The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1992)
• Light Industry in New York (2010)
• Circa 1971: Early Video & Film from the EAI Archive at Dia: Beacon (2011-2012)
• The Embodied Vision: Performance for the Camera at the Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado in Lisbon (2014)
• Anthony Ramos: Vidéo et après at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2014)
• Tell It Like It Is: Black Independents in New York, 1968-1986 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York (2015)

Teaching and Painting

Anthony Ramos taught at Rhode Island School of Design, New York University, and the University of California at San Diego, among others. Since the late 1980s he has primarily worked in painting. Several international venues exhibited his work, among them the American Jazz Museum and Bruce R. Watkins Cultural Center, Kansas City; Biennale de Dakur, Senegal.

References

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