Press 2026

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For our most recent publication, we’ve chosen to center it around what Cuban historical novelist, critical essayist, and short story writer Antonio Benítez-Rojo once termed the ‘supersyncretic’ culture of the Caribbean - a rich tapestry of ever-evolving interwoven traditions and expressions. 

We live in a time of suppression — by governments, by corporations, by culture. What do we do against it? 

Let us show you. Below, we take you into a revolutionary photo studio in Mali that chronicled a nation’s independence. A document of a city devastated by the AIDS crisis through portraits not just of people but of inanimate objects. A meditation on grief and death, and also a monument to the city’s first Arabic-speaking enclave.

As the leading art fairs and art weeks have rapidly grown bigger, more overwhelming and increasingly homogenized, art world professionals and collectors are turning their attention to dynamic and expanding art scenes outside of major art hubs.

As the leading art fairs and art weeks have rapidly grown bigger, more overwhelming and increasingly homogenized, art world professionals and collectors are turning their attention to dynamic and expanding art scenes outside of major art hubs.

For when we speak of colonization, what happened to the body is also what happened to the land. The Caribbean, the original home of the Tainos, Arawaks, Caribs, Kalinagos, Ciguayos, and Macorixes, often becomes flattened through the tourist imagination—reduced to postcards and brochures selling paradise. This erasure silences the resilience, violence, and histories of these lands and their people.

Self-taught Dominican painter Bony Ramirez once dreamed of being a children’s book illustrator, and it’s not hard to spot the marks those dreams left on his paintings now—vibrant colors, ornate scenery and oddly-proportioned characters with cartoonish eyes.

I’ve never met anyone like Bony Ramirez. I probably never will again. He’s like an art angel that magically landed on earth. We often joke about me not selecting him for an open call in 2019 before he’d had a chance to exhibit in New York City.

When Montreal gallery Bradley Ertaskiran first brought Dominican-born,

New Jersey-based artist Bony Ramirez to town in 2021 for a show, art fans

were immediately struck by his distorted and stylized depictions of black and

brown bodies situated among symbolic Caribbean flora and bathed in the

bright colours of the region. 

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth announces Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists since 1940.

Organized by Curator María Elena Ortiz, this presentation will be on view at the Modern March 10 through July 28, 2024. The thematic exhibition is inspired by the history of Surrealism in the Caribbean with connections to notions of the Afrosurreal in the United States. 

There is a school of thought that takes issue with magazines and nonprofits that sort and platform artists based on age, citing the art world’s sometimes exploitative relationship to novelty and the need to make room for an idea of emergence that isn’t tied to youth.

Island hospitality is phony. That’s the cynical statesider’s supposition, anyway: that the big smile of the cabana boy, the crispness of the bellhop, the servility of the concierge are all covers for a deep reserve of distrust, and even dislike, of the Yankee patron.

When he was a child, artist Bony Ramirez moved from his native Dominican Republic to New Jersey. The first museum he ever visited in his new home was The Newark Museum of Art. After working for years in construction while also painting in his mother's kitchen, Ramirez is now a full-time self-taught artist.

When Bony Ramirez and his family immigrated from the Dominican Republic to Perth Amboy he was just 13 and had no photographs of himself or of Tanares, the humble river town where he grew up. A place, he says, where kids could swim every day and be free.

Dominican-born, NJ-based artist Bony Ramirez has brought his dreamy imagination of the Caribbean to the Newark Museum of Art. Expanding beyond the canvas and building those narratives in the space, the pieces on show in “Bony Ramirez: Cattleya” oscillate between a sense of longing and belonging in a land he has been far from for a long time now.

“I thought about how orchids in general are [like] these beautiful parasites that attach themselves to trees and don’t exactly bring anything positive to them,” artist Bony Ramirez told ARTnews during a recent interview.

In 2019, Bony Ramirez was earning his living as a New Jersey construction worker while quietly making paintings that he doubted anyone would ever see. Five years later, his solo exhibition of new work, Cattleya (until 9 March 2025), organised by Elena Muñoz-Rodriguez, is on view at the Newark Museum of Art, bringing the self-taught artist full circle even as his career continues gaining speed.

If you’re itching for a day trip to escape the New York fall frenzy, there’s no shortage of art to explore just outside the city. The autumn leaves make for a scenic drive to the Newark Art Museum, where Bony Ramirez takes an incisive deep-dive into the colonial history of orchids, or the Princeton University Art Museum’s exhibition of 20 works by the trailblazing eco-feminist artist Helène Aylon.

This November, Shanghai kicks off with its annual art week as the global art community gathers for Art021 (November 7–10) and West Bund Art & Design (November 8–10), two major fairs that have brought together international galleries and local institutions to the city for over a decade. To help navigate this year’s art week, our associate editor Louis Lu has compiled a list of the best galleries and exhibitions to visit across the Chinese megacity this month.

Staged at the Dacra headquarters in Miami, the Craig Robins Collection unveils The Sleep of Reason, a presentation of over 300 works hailing from the esteemed collection of the Design District powerhouse. Drawing inspiration from Francisco Goya’s 1799 etching “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (The sleep of reason produces monsters)” from his seminal Los Caprichos series, the exhibition revels in a fascination with surreal states, infusing the office space with creative spirit of its surrounding neighborhood.

Join us at Maxon Mills in celebrating all that the Wassaic Project has been, is, and can be. We’ll be honoring Bony Ramirez at the event.

El Caribe es una constante en las creaciones y uno de los puntos de referencia más característicos de la imaginación del artista visual y escultor dominicano Bony Ramírez. 

Self-taught painter Bony Ramirez explores contemporary Caribbean life

 The next show opens March 9, 2023, and it has many stories to tell. “Bony Ramirez: CARIBABY” is the first institutional solo exhibition for Dominican-born artist Bony Ramirez 

Stop into François Ghebaly Gallery for the closing of two exhibitions on February 4, 2023. The exhibitions include: “Hoof on Bone” by Jessie Makinson, and “CAYMAN TEARS” by Bony Ramirez.

Marking their 70th anniversary, A Living Legacy brings together eight recently acquired artworks by art stars Amoako Boafo, Sky Hopinka, Gisela McDaniel, Bony Ramirez, Tschabalala Self, Ann Leda Shapiro, and Sadie Wechsler

Bony Ramirez: CARIBARY, the first institutional solo exhibition for Dominican-born artist Bony Ramirez, celebrates Dominican/Caribbean culture through the lens of portraiture and magical realism

On the occasion of Art of the Americas on Artnet Auctions, CJ Greenhill Caldera spoke to Bony Ramirez about his practice, and ways to thoughtfully engage with the Art of the Americas.

In Bony Ramírez's portraits, sculptural, drawn and painted, the compositional techniques of Renaissance portraiture are applied to the depiction of Caribbean iconography and culture.. 

Self-taught artist Bony Ramirez continues to paint distorted figures inspired by his time spent in the Dominican Republic as a child. 

In addition to the purses, the duo has designed a black sweatshirt featuring Dominican-American artist Bony Ramirez’s artwork Feeding a Child of the Ocean on the back.

Connected to his roots, Ramirez retains a connection to his Dominican heritage through his art, incorporating elements of the Caribbean with his own distinctive details. Through a combination of painting and drawing, Ramirez adheres life-size paper figures onto painted wood panels.

Tiffany Alfonseca curates her second exhibition focusing on diasporic Dominican and Caribbean identity at Calderón Gallery. Featured artists include Diego Espaillat, Delvin Lugo, José Morbán, Devin Osorio, Bony Ramirez, Kenny Rivero, and Raelis Vasquez.

Bony and I have been friends for quite a bit. As descendants of the Dominican diaspora we have a lot of the same visual references and deep connection to our culture.

“There’s a lot of symbolism in my work that is specifically very Caribbean and unless you’re from that part of the world, sometimes you’re not going to get it,” Bony Ramirez, 26, tells me from his studio in New Jersey.

Exciting news from the Perth Amboy Art scene. Bony Ramirez aka Christopher Ramirez from Perth Amboy, NJ has received the honor of being listed in the Forbes 2023 30 Under 30 List.

Self-taught artist Bony Ramírez paints large-scale figures inspired by his childhood memories of the Dominican Republic, cartoonish children’s illustrations, and the anatomical inaccuracies of the Italian Mannerist painters

Bony Ramirez moved from the Dominican Republic at the age of 13 and has now spent half his life in New Jersey, where he now is emerging star of the art world. His work is about memory and remaking the DR in his mind, a combination of folktales and his own impressions, as well as a powerful sense of where he came from and where he exists now.

Through a combination of painting and drawing, I adhere life-size paper figures onto painted wood panels. My subjects are bold yet strange, often appearing mysteriously oversized or contorted.

While the Armory Show is a capitalist bacchanal, it’s also like an end-of-summer cookout, bringing parts of the art community together in celebration.

When he was 13, the artist Bony Ramirez's family informed him that they were taking a vacation to the United States from their home in the Dominican Republic. “I was told that we were just coming for two weeks, to visit Disney World, and we were going to come back,” he said. “We never went to Disney World, and we’ve never been back.”

The raw depiction of subjects through vivid colors come to life in the work of Bony Ramirez. Throughout his artistic practice, Ramirez merges iconic Caribbean elements through Renaissance forms of composition to address the history and culture of a colonized Dominican Republic, where he was born and raised.

 Just south of the intersection of Grand and Orchard streets in the hub of New York’s Lower East Side, twenty-one works of painting, sculpture and assemblage have come together at Company Gallery’s fifth-floor suit in what feels like a gathering of both long-lost friends and newfound acquaintances. 

The new gallery Calderón Ruiz will open in September in Manhattan’s South Street Seaport district with a focus on supporting Latinx artists who have too often been underrepresented in the market.

The Afro-Carribean founder of New York gallery REGULARNORMAL speaks on building art spaces for emerging talent.

But this one feels different, because every face in every painting belongs to a person of color. Every piece of art was created by a person of color. And the exhibition was organized by two young people of color curating their first major show.

Dominican born and US based visual artist Bony Ramirez's works explore complex social and political issues through sumptuously rendered depictions of anatomically distorted figures.

Bony Ramírez finds working in a single medium restrictive. Rather, the Dominican Republic-born and New Jersey-based artist prefers to use a whole host of mediums.

It was during his early education in the Dominican Republic that the artist was first exposed to local iconography, with the easily identifiable symbols and motifs still making appearances in his current work, acting as a common visual language across cultures.

Resistant to dogmatic principles, especially in art making, Ramirez creates figures that, while elaborately rendered, dissolve into anatomical transformations: beginning with one idea before challenging its correctness and authority.

Born in the Dominican Republic and based in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, self-taught artist Bony Ramirez fashions entrancing, dramatic works that celebrate his rich Caribbean culture and reflect on his native country’s traumatic history.

An enthusiastic and engaging conversation with Dominican-born painter and sculptor Bony Ramirez (he/him). The Salcedo native and New Jersey-based artist reveals a new solo show at Thierry Goldberg opening November 7, and the unifying intent behind his aesthetic “Caribbean Luxury.”