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for Virginia Jaramillo
Virginia Jaramillo
born El Paso, TX 1939
Lives/WorksSouthampton, New York, United States
BornEl Paso, Texas, United States
BiographyVirginia Jaramillo was born in El Paso and raised in Los Angeles, where she studied at the Otis Art Institute. Jaramillo established herself in the Los Angeles art community, making paintings that explored the terrain of the city and responded to earth works, taking the desert as a subject. She moved to New York City in the late 1960s, where she continues to live and work. In 1979, Jaramillo contributed as a Mexican-American voice on the editorial collective for “Third World Women: The Politics of Being Other,” an issue of Heresies, the international feminist journal of art and politics. Through bold abstract paintings, mixed media, and handmade paper works, Jaramillo explores human perceptions of the physical and spiritual worlds. Her early, increasingly large-scale, abstract paintings received immediate attention, yielding a 1980 solo exhibition at the Mexican Museum in San Francisco. “Classical geometry, pre-Hispanic architecture, and the ancient civilizations which built their cities and credited their very existence to beliefs, cultural myths and cosmologies in order to better understand their world. . . . there’s a consistent conceptual current running from the start: my investigation into systems of perception.”
Person TypeIndividual
born Bessemer, AL 1939; died New York, NY 2018