Mariana Ramos Ortiz creates various scale pieces that combine the medium of screen printing on sand, a non-traditional surface, often addressing Puerto Rico’s colonial status.
Working between Providence, Rhode Island, and her hometown of Cabo Rojo in the west of Puerto Rico, Ramos explores the current state of the Caribbean Island as a colony of the United States and its implications on its environment.
Mariana’s formal introduction to the arts began in High School at the San Germán Interamericana School in San Germán, Puerto Rico. This school had a program that allowed high school students to begin college courses before attending university. Although it is usually geared towards math and the sciences, she would take the opportunity to try her hand at art, starting with drawing courses and eventually her first printmaking class. Diving deep into printmaking and falling in love with the medium, she continued developing her skills and learning about the printmaking world by helping her teacher, Professor Fernando Santiago, print his works on weekends, also allowing to print her own work. This knowledge would spark the drive to pursue a college academic career in the arts, which she did at the University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras Campus in San Juan, Puerto Rico, enrolling in their Fine Arts Department. Ramos being an honor student had access to university programs that offered possible opportunities to further her academics. These programs in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017 led her to a one-year exchange with Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. This one-year exchange would inspire and give her the experiences necessary to pursue a Master’s degree in the arts. Mariana would receive her MFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2021, three years after her exchange at Brown University.
Currently exploring the limits of the printmaking medium, Mariana has been able to use a non-traditional surface that took her years to refine and master, sand, a material that has always interested her, playing and sculpting it in childhood, as many of us do at the beach. Mariana and her siblings would sculpt more than the typical sandcastle, creating household furniture like couches on the Puerto Rican coast. Wanting to find a way to include sand in her work, she tried her hand with flocking, a technique primarily used in textiles, on her piece Este archipiélago no está a la venta in 2019. This would be her first milestone in working with sand. While she continued to experiment with these techniques and tried to push the limits of the medium’s surfaces, during her master’s at the Rhode Island School of Design, she worked on two pieces, Canción para estrellarse* and La Peregrina. These works explore and play around with the translation and definitions of words in the Spanish language and their English translations that encompass aspects of the colonial subjects’ experience through powerless and impractical playful points of view. In 2021, two years after her 2019 piece, she’s able to print on sand as a surface, making its debut on her pieces Playground and Playgrounds, which consisted of sandboxes built from medium-density fiberboard with silkscreened images of her hometown, Cabo Rojo. A critical moment that would lead her to perfect this technique and create other works like Caña Gorda in 2022. Mariana’s work doesn’t end in creating silkscreened images on sand but also exploring the sculpting medium, beginning with her 2021 piece La arena fabrica ficciones como actos de resistencia, which is made from casted sand, as well as her 2022 piece Breezeblocks I which explores modular elements of Puerto Rican architecture as protectoral structures. Ramos’ works have also been exhibited in several group exhibitions that range locations from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Massachusetts, New York, Philadelphia, Rhode Island, and Utah.
Mariana’s work has been continuously growing and exploring because of the encouragement and support she has received from many people around her, especially her family, who did everything possible to support her academic dreams of studying at the University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras Campus. She also not only credits her one-year exchange at Brown University on her decision to pursue a master’s degree, but she also credits a 2019 independent students’ program at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo of Puerto Rico (MAC) that introduced her to cultural managers, curators, other artists, and people that are part of the Puerto Rican artistic community. It was through understanding how other people manifest their work that she began to question her practice, ultimately sealing her path towards an MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design. Ramos has also participated in residencies like 2022s Assets 4 Artists The Studios at MASS MoCA in Massachusetts, which has helped her learn more about creating independently outside academic spaces such as colleges or universities. This year, Mariana has also been chosen to receive the Interlace Grant Fund, co-administered by Dirt Palace Public Projects and Providence College Galleries, with underwriting from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. This last fund has been the biggest and most significant support she has received at the moment. It has allowed her to develop parts of her work she wouldn’t have been able to do because of time and the scarcity of economic support and community.
Mariana now joins Paraffin for several reasons. The most important is the interest in reading about other artists in and outside Puerto Rico and, at the same time, joining in conversations with them as well. There’s also curiosity and a sense of value for a project that is actively trying to archive who these artists are and the simple aspects of their formation and growth, which will hopefully help whoever is looking for this type of information.
Images provided by Mariana Ramos Ortiz
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