Martín Ramírez

1895-1963 · Jalisco, Mexico / California, USA

He crossed to California for railroad work, lost everything in the Depression, and spent his last three decades silent in state hospitals, drawing trains, tunnels and horsemen on glued-together scraps.

The life

Ramírez left his ranch in Jalisco in 1925 to earn money on Californian railroads and in the mines. Ruined and unable to get home, he was picked up in 1931, diagnosed, almost certainly wrongly, with catatonic schizophrenia, and spent 32 years institutionalised, latterly at DeWitt State Hospital. Barely speaking, he drew relentlessly, sticking paper scraps together with potato starch and saliva. A visiting psychology professor, Tarmo Pasto, recognised the work and saved hundreds of sheets; a further cache surfaced in 2007.

The work

Around 450 surviving drawings and collages: a proud jinete, the horseman, framed by rhythmic tunnels and stage-like prosceniums, trains diving through ribbed hillsides, Madonnas crowned and serene, the American and Mexican halves of his life laid over each other. In 2015 the US Postal Service put five of his drawings on stamps.

Why we love them

Displacement drawn as architecture. Those pulsing tunnel lines are homesickness made visible, and they are unforgettable.

Go deeper

• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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