Aida Ramirez is a mixed media who currently lives and works in Chicago, IL. She is currently completing her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Though she received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), in Printmaking with a concentration in Book Arts, her practice often shifts between printed media, performance, writing, and workshopping. Much of Ramirez’s work is centered around ideas of collaboration, community, and cultural identities within groups. Recently, Ramirez and her partner, Chas Druin, founded Fugitive Collective and have been producing, organizing, and writing inspired by concepts such as running away, survival, and sustainable communal living.
More about the work
Over the course of the past several years, I have worked to better understand my culture and identity. In her poem, "Me sacas lo mexicana en mi", Sandra Cisneros lists out an explanation of all the ways that a single person in her life "brings out the Mexican" in her. Much of my work is a dialogue between myself and my layered identities, as I continue to work towards a way of defining myself and my place in the world around me. Through various mediums, I work to address the complexities of Tejana identity, as I live with the privilege of citizenship, but the weight of being brown-bodied.
Through a continuous translation of writing, to performance, to object documentation, I aim to investigate personal narrative within limits of culturally specific material. Due to its materiality, much of the work exists within a strict color palette of sepia and natural brown tones. Brownness as a theme is guided within a definition of Xicanx (pronounced: chicanx) identity. Here, I use the spelling given by Cherrie Moraga, to address a Chicanx identity that is tied to the earth and soil, rather than borders or nationalities. By using culturally specific materials, historical printing processes, or culinary-inspired methods of making I am able to cannibalize my identity into an artistic practice. Practice becoming ceremony– enacted in solidarity as a soft-spoken alignment that could have the potential to be felt deeply and resignedly.