Becoming an Artist is Not a Linear Path
Bony Ramirez, Nate Lewis and Patricia Ayres
Joining us in February 2022, Bony, Nate, and Patricia are part of Fountainhead Residency's inaugural Becoming an Artist is Not a Linear Path residency. The residency is focused around their shared experience as artists who took non-traditional routes to their current artistic practice. The residency is sponsored in part by Leslie and Michael Weissman and Lois Whitman Hess and Eliot Hess.
Bony Ramirez
Bony Ramirez’s meteoric rise to recognition lies squarely with the singularity of his portraits: He draws his figures with an unflinching personal style that borrows from both Cubist and Renaissance influences while ensconcing them in the familiarity of his own Caribbean backdrop. Drawing his figures first on paper before mounting them on wood and painting a backdrop around them, Bony is inspired by the form and style of painters like Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso; draws references from the Renaissance paintings that he remembers from growing up Catholic and visiting the church, and selects colors, icons and motifs - a chartreuse plantain, jungle green vines or a cerulean sea - to consider his native land’s violent history as a colonial territory. The Dominican-born artist, who moved to New Jersey just before he started high school, never imagined a career as an artist until he made his very recent breakthrough into the contemporary art world. Since being discovered on Instagram at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic - his initial success was borne of an online exhibition with Thierry Goldberg gallery in New York - Bony has exhibited his work with Deitch Projects, Company Gallery, Nino Mier gallery, Regular Normal, and others. Recently, his work was acquired by Perez Art Museum Miami, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, The X Museum, The Frye Art Museum, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He was named a 2021 Artsy Vanguard, a remarkable feat for a 25-year-old artist who has no formal training and was painting in his kitchen less than two years ago.
Nate Lewis
Remarkably, Nate Lewis never made a single work of art until he was 25 years old, when he started a T-shirt line that led into creating a community art event in Washington, D.C. At the time, Nate had been working as a critical care nurse, and the diagnostic imagery of x-rays, MRIs, and CT scans seeped into his illustrations, helping him for the basis of his work. As an athlete, musician, and medical worker, Nate’s work is driven largely by movement. Whether bringing to life the sonic vibrations of jazz or conjuring his figures to spring to life from a flattened surface, Nate is interested in the tension between balanced and imbalanced systems and how they are cultivated. His figures, often photographs of Black men and women he affixes onto paper and then carves and sculpts patterns onto, are a celebration and appreciation of the diverse disciplines of movement within the African diaspora. He often uses light to shift the viewer’s point of view of the work depending on their vantage point, a technique that mimics how we frame our ideas based on how we move through the world. Since starting a trajectory toward becoming a professional artist 10 years ago, Nate’s work has been acquired by the Baltimore Museum of Art, The Blanton Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Brooklyn Museum, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, among others. He has lectured at Yale University as part of Claudia Rankine’s Racial Imaginary Institute, the Yale Center for British Art, and Paris Photo, and is represented by Fridman Gallery in New York.
Patricia Ayres
The core of Patricia Ayres’ work deals with exploring manifestations of the body when under the duress of systemic oppression. Patricia is interested in the physical and psychological scars an oppressive experience marks onto the body, creating a cycle of generational harm. Drawing from a former career as a fashion designer, Patricia still imagines the body when sourcing and preparing materials for construction, but merely alludes to the figure instead of recreating it. Her practice includes a process of cutting, stitching, pulling, wrapping, and staining elastic with iodine, gunk, paint, and anointing oils. Constraining and restraining her materials together to form large, crude sculptures, Patricia examines the physical and emotional torture embedded within isolation, separation, and confinement. Patricia is currently represented by Matthew Brown gallery in Los Angeles, is featured in a group exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara and has work in the Bunker Art Space in Palm Beach, FL and at Zuzeum in Latvia.
