Tell Me Who You’re With & I’ll Let You Know Who You Are / Dime Con Quién Andas y Te Diré Quién Eres

Querendon © Daniel Ramos, 2018

_{^{Exhibit dates: August 19 - December 9, 2022}}

TXST COMMON EXPERIENCE Systems Thinking Exhibition

The Wittliff Collections is proud to present work from visionary photographic artist DANIEL RAMOS. This exhibition includes select works from two of his photographic series, The Land of Illustrious Men and Eres Muy Hermosa (You are Very Beautiful). Early in his career, Daniel decided that the people in his life—family, friends, coworkers—would be the subjects of his work. He used photography as a vehicle to magnify their presence in the world and has recently moved beyond the single image convention of picture-making to create 3-dimensional sculptures, large-scale collages, and mixed media installations.

Tell Me Who You’re With and I’ll Let You Know Who You Are/ Dime Con Quién Andas y Te Diré Quién Eres is a phrase that Daniel’s grandmother would say frequently. In 2019, Daniel produced The Land of Illustrious Men, an artist book that reveals his and his family’s life in roughly chronological order. A selection of images from this series are on view in this gallery. The centerpiece of this exhibition is a photo-montage triptych titled “How Many Generations Does It Take To Be Treated As A Human Being?” Daniel made the triptych combining his own photographs with digitized photographic postcards from the Susan Toomey Frost collection of postcards of Mexico, housed in The Wittliff.

Eres Muy Hermosa (You are Very Beautiful) is largely comprised of portraits taken with a large format camera, featuring people in bars and clubs as well as night scenes in Monterrey, Mexico. He began this series in 2018. That same year, Daniel researched the Boystown collection at The Wittliff. In the 1970s, Bill Wittliff acquired and preserved thousands of negatives from the photographers who took party pictures in Boystown, the red-light district on the border, providing an eyewitness account of those who lived and worked there. A small number of photographs from Boystown are included in this exhibition.

Daniel Ramos is a current NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow for Photography and was awarded the 2022 Sprouting Spaces residency by Clementina Arts Foundation in Connecticut. He was the 2021-2022 fellow at NXTHVN in New Haven, Connecticut; Artist-In-Residence at Light Work, Syracuse, NY, in June 2021; and held the 2020-2021 Pollock-Krasner Residency at ISCP in Brooklyn, NY. In March 2020, Daniel completed the Spring International Artist-In-Residence program at Artpace in San Antonio, Texas. He taught photography at Texas State University during the fall 2020 semester and was awarded the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize in 2018. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Photography from Columbia College Chicago. Daniel and his wife, Kristina and son, Max, currently live in New York City.