Just in time for the holiday season, the Linda Pace Foundation’s Ruby City Gallery is featuring an exhibit of Christmas trees created by San Antonio artist Chuck Ramirez, known affectionately as Tia Chuck. According to a Ruby City press release, “Commissioned by Linda Pace, these freestanding trees feature everyday items and oddities, from spoons and…
On the Chartreuse Couch: Gene Elder Interviews Filmmakers Mark and Angela Walley, Directors of ‘Tia Chuck’
Editor’s note: “Tía Chuck: A Portrait of Chuck Ramirez” is the feature length directorial debut by San Antonio filmmakers Angela and Mark Walley that chronicles the life and work of the late artist Chuck Ramirez. Gene Elder: Thanks for your great film about Chuck. And have a seat on the green sofa. I know that…
2017 In Review: Artistic Highlights and Milestones
Originally published in the San Antonio Current. As we prepare to bid farewell to a year riddled with chaos and tragedy, and cautiously welcome another with an odd combination of hope and uncertainty, it feels slightly therapeutic to revisit some of San Antonio’s more notable moments of 2017. In an effort to paint a broad…
Rites of Passage: Forever Remembering Tía Chuck
A lot has changed in San Antonio in the seven years since Chuck Ramirez died. There are working artists, young ones and transplants from elsewhere, who never knew him. To his extended group of close friends, acquaintances, a still-tight micro-community of Southtown artists (for whom the rise of Artpace and Sala Diaz, the expansion of…
McNay Sets Fall Opening for Chuck Ramirez Retrospective
San Antonio’s McNay Art Museum announced this week that it will mount the first major retrospective featuring the work of renowned local artist Chuck Ramirez who died in 2010 in a bicycle accident. The exhibit, titled “All This and Heaven Too,” is being organized by McNay curator René Paul Barilleaux and is set to open…
The Witty World of Franco Mondini-Ruiz
A Quick Biographical Rundown Franco Mondini-Ruiz was born in 1961. He grew up in conservative, white Boerne, Texas. His father is a rakish and artistic immigrant from Italy who grew up during the Mussolini regime. His mother is Mexican-American and the daughter of a severe Spaniard, and she occasionally posed for Franco’s father’s paintings. Franco…
More Than Words features Ramirez, Diaz
More Than Words “History of Text in Visual Art” Ruiz-Healy Art 201-A East Olmos Drive ruizhealyart.com April 11 at 1pm, Ruiz-Healy Art will host “History of Text in Visual Art” by guest lecturer Ruben Cordova in conjunction with its current exhibition More Than Words: Text Based Artworks. “We are very excited to have Ruben Cordova,”…