Is Blue the Color of the Ocean?

The work is a large upright circle comprised by cast aluminum coconuts and a single gold-colored conch shell. The sculpture has a double meaning, representing both the ubiquitous necklaces circulating throughout the Caribbean via tourist shops and street vendors and a mythical portal transporting people between two worlds. Like Alice’s looking glass, there is another world on the other side but how does this change our perspective? The Caribbean was divided through language by colonizers which, made it difficult for the Black and Brown peoples to communicate with each other from island to island. Miami is one of the few places where the blend of all Caribbean countries takes place. It is a melting pot of all the Caribbean islands, where we can learn about each other, without a language barrier, or simply without the ocean that separates all the islands.

Miami is geographically the closest thing to the Caribbean in the United States of America and for many immigrants, Ramirez included, being in Miami feels like being home. “Visiting Miami from New Jersey or from any other state in the US, for the Caribbean immigrant, feels like passing thru a portal and ending up in a land similar to our own offering a sense of piece and comfort,” describes Ramirez.  “This sculpture is a representation of the passage of time, those first few months that a lot of immigrants go thru trying to assimilate to a new country and realizing of how a place so far from home can feel as welcoming and like your own country. “ 

Bony Ramirez

b. 1996, Tenares, Salcedo, Dominican Republic

Bony Ramirez is a New Jersey-based artist whose work draws inspiration from Caribbean iconography and Renaissance style. In bold portraits of contorted, often nude figures, drawn on paper and then adhered to painted wooden backdrops that evoke the Caribbean tropics, Ramirez’s work meditates on the legacy of colonialism in his native Dominican Republic. He cites Renaissance tropes like romanticized gore as influence: references recontextualized by afro-caribbean elements (a plantain tree, a durag) and reclaimed by the Black and Brown figures who inhabit them. Layers of material evoke the vestiges of Euro-colonialism that continue to inhabit the Caribbean psyche — a “double consciousness” that is occasionally, violently, interrupted.

Ramirez’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Bradley Ertaskiran, Montréal and Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York, as well as recent group exhibitions at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles; Company Gallery, New York; Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles; Regular Normal, New York; Zürcher Gallery, New York and Anna Zorina Gallery, New York. His work is included in collections at the Perez Art Museum, The ICA Miami, The De La Cruz Collection, The Boston Museum of Fine Arts among many others.