LOS ANGELES, CA.- Marc Selwyn Fine Art is presenting Ramsés Noriega: De Sonora a Los Ángeles at the Camden Annex. The exhibition includes works on paper produced between 1968 and 1989, tracing more than two decades of artistic development by the artist.
Considered an early pioneer of the Chicano Art Movement, Ramsés Noriega has cultivated an artistic practice over a six-decade career that explores the many dualities of his lived experience as a Mexican American. Born in 1944 in Caborca, Sonora, Mexico, Noriega immigrated to the United States in the 1950s, where he encountered the systemic mistreatment and lack of opportunity that had previously driven his family back to Mexico. As a teenager, he worked as a migrant farm worker while balancing family responsibilities, education, and student activism—experiences that would profoundly shape his artistic and political consciousness. Noriega was a co-organizer of the 1970 Chicano Moratorium march in East Los Angeles, one of the largest Mexican American anti-war demonstrations in US history, with an estimated 30,000 participants, organized in response to the disproportionate number of Mexican Americans drafted and killed or injured in Vietnam.
The works on paper presented in this exhibition span formative years in Noriega’s art practice. Often employing caricature, distortion, and symbolic imagery to articulate frustration, anxiety, and resistance, the work reflects the artist’s inner struggles and the broader political realities facing black and brown individuals in the United States. In Hello!, 1968, Noriega depicts a tuxedoed skeleton in anguish while oranges descend like bombs in the background. The figure represents the Catrín character from the Mexican lotería boardgame and draws parallels between chemical warfare in Vietnam with ‘Agent Orange’ and the toxic pesticides migrant workers were exposed to at home. Prisionero, 1989, expresses the state of marginalization felt by the artist, depicting a solitary tormented prisoner.
Drawings like Cuatro figuras incongruentes, 1974, Anger Against the Unknown, 1968, La maldición, 1969, and She Prophet, 1988, use surreal imagery with references to pre-Columbian mythologies and spirituality to tackle themes of violent aggression, racial inequality, and oppression. Studies of insects, animal bones, lizards, and grasses populate landscapes rendered with the same surreal influence, drawn from Noriega’s experience of living in the Sonora Desert.
Noriega frequently investigates incongruities in life. In La muerte mamá, 1968, the artist depicts a joyful portrait of motherhood with laughing Dia De Los Muertos-like skeletal figures, highlighting the inseparable connection between life and death. Similarly, El emascarado de plata, 1968, references El Santo, a famous Mexican Lucha Libre character whose reputation for violence contrasts with the implied divinity of his name and costume.
Concurrent with this exhibition, Noriega’s work is also on view at the Chicano Park Museum and Cultural Center in Fragmentos Del Barrio: A 60 Year Retrospective. The exhibition, on view until February 28, 2026, surveys six decades of the artist’s work and activism. A catalog has been published in tandem with the retrospective, offering critical insight into the enduring significance of his work.
