Virginia Jaramillo

Virginia Jaramillo is an American artist of Mexican heritage. Born in 1939 in El Paso, Texas, she was raised and educated in Los Angeles before moving to New York City. She has exhibited in exhibitions internationally since 1959.

Early life and education Virginia Jaramillo was born on March 21, 1939, in El Paso, Texas. Her family moved to California when she was 2 years old, In 1959, her painting Satire, which she had completed in her childhood bedroom, was included in LACMA's annual exhibition of contemporary art. They left Los Angeles amidst the Watts riots and related unrest in the city. The move to Paris was Jaramillo's first experience leaving the country. Although Jaramillo and Johnson only lived in Paris for a year, her time in the city had a significant impact on her: "It changed the way I looked at things and it kind of zipped open my brain." After returning from Paris in 1966, Jaramillo and Johnson retrieved their belongings from California and moved to New York.

Jaramillo's art has been primarily concerned with materials, and she states that "partly fuelled by her Mexican-American heritage," her "personal and artistic life has been a political statement." Her experiences led to her involvement in various feminist projects, such as the Third World Women issue of Heresies journal, and working on the board of the Feminist Art Institute. and included artists such as Sam Gilliam, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski. During the 1970s she continued to exhibit. Group shows included participation in the Whitney Annual at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1972. Solo exhibitions were held at the Douglas Drake Gallery in Kansas City, and the Soho Center for Visual Artists in 1976.

Later recognition In 2011, Jaramillo's work was included in Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. In 2017 she was included in We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965-85 at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, and in the Tate Modern's Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power.

The Brooklyn Museum purchased Jaramillo's 1971 painting Untitled in 2017 through the Frieze Brooklyn Museum Fund. Initially produced for The De Luxe Show, at the time of auction this painting - along with three others by Jaramillo - had not been seen in 40 years.

In 2020, Jaramillo staged her first-ever solo museum exhibition at the Menil Collection in Houston.

Jaramillo's work was included in the 2021 exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou.

In 2023, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri, staged Jaramillo's first full-career museum retrospective, Principle of Equivalence.

Exhibitions 1971 The DeLuxe Show, The Deluxe Theater, Houston 1972 Whitney Annual, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 1975 Douglas Drake Gallery, Kansas City (solo show) 1976 Soho Center for Visual Arts, New York (solo show)

Notes, citations, and references