Lawrence Weschler & Ramiro Gomez

The writer Lawrence Weschler first encountered the work of the painter Ramiro Gomez at an art fair, where he noted Gomez’s insightful riffing on the work of David Hockney. Gomez calls attention to Southern California’s invisible domestic workers by inserting them into recasted familiar scenes by other artists or ads from luxe magazines.

Weschler and Gomez will discuss their new book, Domestic Scenes: The Art of Ramiro Gomez. A book signing will follow the conversation.

Ramiro Gomez was born in 1986 in San Bernardino, California to undocumented Mexican immigrant parents who have since become US citizens. He briefly attended the California Institute for the Arts before leaving to take work as a live-in nanny with a West Hollywood family, an experience that did much to inform his subsequent artistic practice. 

In 2013 Gomez had his first solo exhibition at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, and was also awarded with a residency to install a mural in West Hollywood Park, a project titled The Caretakers, which remains on view. In 2014 Gomez had his solo gallery debut at Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles, and went on to show widely across North America.  In 2015 Gomez exhibited at the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities, the Chicago Humanities Festival, and again at Charlie James Gallery.  Gomez's work has been covered in the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, NPR, the Los Angeles Times, Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, and CNN. In the spring of 2016, Gomez had his third show at the Charlie James Gallery in conjunction with the publication of a monograph on his work by Lawrence Weschler (Abrams). Gomez lives and works in West Hollywood, California.