Tamayo ─ The New York Years

E. Carmen Ramos is the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s curator of Latino art; she joined the museum’s staff in 2010. Since then, she has dramatically expanded the museum’s pioneering collection of Latino art with an eye toward capturing the broad aesthetic and regional range of the field. Her research interests include modern and contemporary Latino, Latin American, and African American art.

Currently, she is organizing Tamayo: The New York Years (2017), an exhibition that will consider the shape and impact of Rufino Tamayo’s significant New York tenure during the first half of the 20th century. She also is writing a monograph about Freddy Rodríguez, part of the A Ver: Revisioning Art History book series published by UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center. Ramos organized the exhibition Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art (2013), which is now on a multi-city U.S. tour. The accompanying catalogue received a 2014 co-first prize Award for Excellence by the Association of Art Museum Curators.

Before joining SAAM’s staff, Ramos was an assistant curator for cultural engagement at The Newark Museum and an independent curator. She has curated exhibitions such as The Caribbean Abroad: Contemporary Artists and Latino Migration (2003), which featured the work of Nicolas Dumit Estevez, Scherezade Garcia, Miguel Luciano and Juana Valdes, as well as projects with Franco Mondini-Ruiz, Freddy Rodríguez, Paul Henry Ramirez and Chakaia Booker, among others.

Ramos earned a bachelor’s degree from New York University (1988), and a master’s degree (1995) and a doctorate (2011) from the University of Chicago.