INTRODUCTION
The Date Farmers are Armando Lerma and Carlos Ramirez, self-taught makers of bricolage works that exhibit a swath of influences from Mesoamerican imagery to SoCal tagger art. Their assemblages—of drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation—are often composed of materials the artists scavenge on excursions into Mexico. Images as incongruous (or not) as pop culture icons, prison tattoos, and political posters are juxtaposed and re-contextualized in ways that subvert and complicate meaning. The Date Farmers’ work celebrates an ethic that values the homemade, the salvaged, the collaborative.
“Their art has all the psychotropic genius, working-class vigor and native guile of a lowrider customized by a shaman,” writes Carlo McCormick in a 2007 article in Paper Magazine. “Their work is broadly expressive of their home-as-diaspora sensibility: raucous colors, tattooed cholos, scavenged traditions and Dumpster-diving detritus, moving from Oaxacan sign painting and zocalo street life to comics and graffiti.”
Originally from the southern California desert town of Indio, Ramirez and Lerma make art that reflects their Mexican-American heritage and borderland upbringing. Ramirez picked dates on Lerma’s father’s farm, and his mother was a migrant worker who took part in activist Cesar Chavez’s 1970s grape boycott. The two artists met in 1998, recognized their kindred artistic spirit, and decided to work in partnership. The LA art scene dubbed them the “Date Farmers,” and the name stuck.
They have shown their work at the Fifty24SF Gallery in San Francisco, the Oakland Museum of California, the Palm Springs Art Museum, the Jonathan LeVine Gallery in New York, and the Leonard Street Gallery in London. Their two-part exhibition at Ace Gallery in Los Angeles in late 2010 and early 2011 was an Artforum critics’ pick; the works in this portfolio are culled from that show.
M.W
