Belkis Ramirez
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Belkis Ramirez is Dominican artist who challenges the expected role of women in the arts and society as a whole. Only a handful of women in the Dominican Republic have attained positions of stature in the arts, and those have tended to be painters. Indeed, with few models to emulate and with few female colleagues to offer day-to-day encouragement, many have abandoned their youthful interests in the field. Therefore, Ramirez’s recent prominence as an installation artist is significant; that her work is so pointedly political makes her achievement all the more noteworthy.
In her installations, Ramirez has developed a characteristic pictorial language through her merging of large-scale graphics, the actual woodblocks from which she produces her prints, natural elements and domestic objects. Ramirez is an architect by training and her works have a sense of physicality meant to actively engage the viewer. In De La Misma Madera (From the Same Wood), 1994 a version of which won the Grand Prize at the XIX Bienal Nacional de Artes Plásticas in Santo Domingo, Ramirez exhibits a multitude of woodblocks, each containing the image of a person's face. Positioned on the ground in front of this sea of faces is a slingshot set into a pile of stones.
For an artist who has previously examined such issues as the position of women in Latin America, the plight of Dominican prostitutes in Europe, freedom of speech and ecological problems, De la misma madera is a characteristic work. It can be read on various levels: it is metaphoric of those who constitute society's aggressors and victims, and suggests that the line separating these roles can be tenuous. In addition, it considers the state of the natural environment in the Dominican Republic, where tropical forests are being ravaged Ramírez reminds us that we are dependent upon nature for our survival and that by destroying it, we destroy ourselves in the process.
