Mel Ramos

Mel Ramos was a native of Sacramento. He pursued his art training at Sacramento Junior College (now Sacramento City College) and received his BA and MA from Sacramento State University. He then went into teaching, first at the high-school level and then at Sacramento State and Arizona State University in Tempe. He spent the majority of his professorial career teaching at California State University, Hayward (now East Bay). 

In 1957, long before finding his unique voice in paintings of superheroes and nudes, Ramos exhibited his figurative abstractions at local galleries and had pieces accepted into exhibitions hosted by the Crocker, and the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. By the early 1960s, his superheroes garnered broad attention, and he secured gallery representation in both New York and Germany.   

Soon Ramos’s paintings became associated with the international phenomenon known as Pop art, through his inspiration from mass media. He incorporated aspects of popular culture into his paintings and prints, and Ramos’ superheroes and nudes were shown alongside the work of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and others. Although Ramos’ paintings participated in Pop’s embrace of the new consumer culture, he and other Californians, most notably his friend and mentor Wayne Thiebaud, ultimately preferred a more traditional approach to painting than their New York peers and laid on pigment in expressive, personal strokes.     

While his exuberant and blatantly sexy paintings of women are included under the Pop art umbrella, Ramos considered his depictions to be “nudes” in the art-historical sense and not “pin-ups.”  Ramos embraced these nudes, just as he did the consumer products he paired them with. This love of subject, combined with playful humor and slick sensuality, truly make his superheroes, nudes, and other pop delights distinctly Californian.