Two Cultures, One Family: Building Family, Finding Home

Krystal Ramirez is an artist and photographer from Las Vegas, NV, by way of El Paso, TX. Ramirez earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Nevada Las Vegas and is pursuing her MFA at Stanford University. She has shown work in galleries and museums throughout the United States.
Ramirez’s work is interdisciplinary and centers around the discernment of class, labor, and consumption of the brown body. As a second-generation immigrant from the working-class landscape of Las Vegas, NV, she employs materials such as plastics, drywall, and paper, highlighting erased labor and the narratives present within the materials. Her use of bright, fluorescent colors creates a spiritual and emotional experience, referencing early sensory experiences of the Catholic church and the neon-clad landscape of Las Vegas. Ramirez enlists monochromatic color palettes when a materials’ journey from deep inside the earth is referenced, alluding to the extraction and the history of extractive materials. Text also plays an important role in Ramirez’s work—through the recontextualizing found text and original writing, she introduces instability to language, creating space to explore impermanence in areas often considered stable and fixed. Ramirez seeks to expand conversations on post-minimalism, to include more nuanced American experiences.

Image courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Mikayla Whitmore.