Mel Ramos b. 1935

Mel Ramos is an American Pop artist specializing in female nudes. He received both his B.A. and M.A. from Sacramento State College, where he studied under Wayne Thiebaud. At the beginning of his artistic career, Ramos focused on cartoons and comic strips, but later created his famous series of Pin-up-Girls, famous female celebrities and superheroes in the 1960s. He poses the female figures with consumer goods, intentionally explicit to make a point about clichés in advertisement.

Ramos has exhibited his work across the U.S. and Europe. He is commonly-considered one of the most iconic Pop artists along with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. The artist was also a professor at California State University, East Bay in Hayward, California from 1966 to 1997 and an Artist-in-Residence at Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin. Ramos is currently Professor Emeritus at California State University.

Mel Ramos has work featured in the permanent collections of the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, the Oakland Museum in California, the Asheville Art Museum, the Berardo Collection Museum in Portugal, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco MoMA, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the MCA in Chicago and the Neue Galerie Stadt Aachen, Germany.

Related Categories: Pop Art, Art of the 1960s, Post-War American Art, California Art, Erotic, Popular Culture, Gender, Classical Mythology, Provocative, Figurative Painting, Americana, United States, Painting, Nostalgia, Comic/Cartoon, Advertising and Brands, Art That Plays With Scale, Work on Paper.