Ramsés Noriega is both an early pioneer of the Chicano Art Movement and among the most important political activists of his generation. His artworks and political graphics of the 1960s and ‘70s stand as manifestations of the struggle and resistance that became El Movimiento and struck the match that united millions across the United States of America and the world to stand up and fight for equality and justice. Bringing together works from this early period along with others from subsequent decades, Ramsés Noriega – Fragmentos del Barrio begins to shed light on the artist’s unique contribution to this foundational era in Chicanx history, highlighting his often-overlooked legacy of activism and individual artistic practice.

Noriega was born in 1944 in Caborca, Sonora, Mexico to Mexican-American immigrants who had traversed the United States / Mexican border in the 1930s seeking a better life in the wake of poor treatment and lack of opportunity in the U.S. Moving back to the United States in 1956 at the age of 12, he attended grammar school in Coachella and high school in Thermal, California. As an immigrant, he faced the same mistreatment and lack of opportunity that drove his family back to Mexico two decades prior, having to now balance his time as a young migrant farmworker and Chicano student activist. Eventually recognized for his early artistic abilities, he received a scholarship to attendart school at the University of California, Los Angeles where he would develop an artistic practice reflective of the many dualities of his and his family’s lived experiences on both sides of the border.

While at UCLA Noriega experienced the historic and latest trends in American art both through his studies and Mexican art through self-study. He would expand on the post-WWII era lessons of the Generación de la Ruptura by the likes of José Luis Cuevas, Francisco Corzas, Alberto Gironella, and Pedro Coronel that began in the 1950s and ‘60s and proposed visual ruptures from the then traditional formulaic art promoted by the Mexican government. At the same time the works of Ben Shahn addressing the plight of the American working class, the viscerally graphic style tied to the atrocities of said war by both Rico Lebrun and Philip Guston, and finally the disruptive criticality being developed by the likes of Bruce Connor and Edward Kienholz greatly influenced the artist. Borrowing then and adapting from these now foundational social responsive bodies of work in Mexico and the U.S., Noriega created an altogether original visual exploration of Chicanidad beginning in the 1960s that blended the here and the there that propose an alternative to what became traditional Chicana/o visual language. These works also stand as some of the most instinctual responses to atrocities occurring in the United States of America against black and brown individuals. Dark and surreal in nature and tied to conceptions of hell on earth that can be found in the writings of French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, Noriega became known for his grotesque caricatures of life that are reflective of both inner and outer struggles. Born of a youthful angst that was inspired by the de-humanizing treatment of Mexican Americans in the U.S., these works embody the artist’s frustrations and anxieties that fueled and helped unite Chicanas/os, African Americans, and Jewish Americans among others to stand against the cruelty of man in a national moratorium against Vietnam.

As the dust began to settle in the wake of the anti-moratorium marches across the U.S., the largest and most visible being held in East Los Angeles on August 29, 1970, that drew 30,000 demonstrators to Laguna Park, today, Ruben F. Salazar Park, Noriega and other organizers began to question what was next? For the artist, his surrealistic and neo-expressionist body of work continued, as did the governmental and police brutality that inspired it. The aggressive intensity in his early work would persist but would transform into an exploration of the overall absurdity of life. Stepping away from anihilistic outlook on mankind, Noriega questions this absurdity with a sense of spirituality and at times hopefulness in the potentiality of the humane. Noriega simultaneously would go on to create a body of work that proposed an alternative Chicana/o visual language that celebrates radical Chicano futurities marked by a neo-indigeneity and the realization of a singular cross-cultural shared identity that could unite Latinidad. Considered among the ranks of a first wave of artists to take part in the Chicano art movement, akin to Roberto Chavez, Eduardo Carillo and Domingo Ulloa, Noriega’s work stands as an embodiment of the hyphen that brings together the Mexican and the American, taking part in all three histories, divided and united. Gathering together three decades of paintings, drawings, political graphics and various ephemera, Ramsés Noriega – Fragmentos del Barrio explores Noriega’s development as an artist, giving viewers a glimpse into the period that began to define what it means to be a Chicana/o in America.