Mel Ramos

Biography Ramos attended Sacramento Junior College and San Jose State College. One of his earliest art teachers was Wayne Thiebaud, who is considered his mentor, and who remained his friend. Ramos received his B.A. and his M.A. from Sacramento State College, finishing his education in 1958.

Along with Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, he was one of the first artists to do paintings of images from comic books, and works of the three were exhibited together at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1963.

In 2009, Ramos was part of the first Portuguese American bilingual art book and exhibit in California "Ashes to Life a Portuguese American Story in Art" with fellow artists Nathan Oliveira, John Mattos and João de Brito.

Ramos originally showed with Leo Castelli. Then Ivan Karp introduced Ramos' work to the art dealer Louis Meisel. He was represented by the Louis K. Meisel Gallery since 1971.

A major exhibition of his work was held at the Albertina in Vienna in 2011.

A retrospective of over 50 years of his work opened at the Crocker Art Museum in his hometown of Sacramento on June 2, 2012.

His work can be found in the permanent collections of the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Norton Simon Museum, and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.

Death

Ramos died of heart failure on October 14, 2018, at Kaiser Hospital in Oakland, California.