Valuable works by Mexican folk artist found as trash in a garage

By RANDY KENNEDY

Published: October 29, 2007

 
The American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan gets a steady stream
of unsolicited e-mail, messages from people claiming to have discovered
a self-taught genius sculpturing away in an Appalachian trailer or a
pile of masterpieces previously serving as barn insulation.
Brooke Davis Anderson, a curator at the museum, reads all such messages that come her way, even the more improbable ones. And in January, just as the museum was opening its critically praised exhibition of the rare, visionary drawings of Martín Ramírez, a Mexican immigrant who lived in a California mental hospital for more than 30 years, she received a two-paragraph letter that was one of the more incredible she had ever seen.

 
Sent to the museum’s general in-box, it came on behalf of a retired middle-school teacher named Peggy Dunievitz, the daughter-in-law of a doctor named Max Dunievitz. Dr. Dunievitz served in the early 1960s as medical director of DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn, Calif., where Mr. Ramírez lived for many years and died in 1963. The e-mail message, composed by Mrs. Dunievitz’s daughter-in-law, Julia, reported matter-of-factly: “Max is no longer with us, but for the years he worked there, he knew Martín and supplied him with colored pencils and things for his art, and as a consequence my mother-in-law has a collection of Martín’s drawings.”

NEW YORK - Some 140 drawings by the late Mexican folk artist Martin Ramirez, once destined for the trash, survived for more than two decades in a California garage and will be shown next year at the American Folk Art Museum. His drawings command tens of thousands of dollars on the art market.

 
Earlier this year, the museum mounted a well-received retrospective of 96 of Ramirez's works. Some of the newly discovered work will be displayed next October, Anderson said.


 
The discovery of the works by the self-taught draftsman, who spent almost three decades in mental institutions, was astounding given that only 300 of his drawings and collages were known to exist until now, the museum said Monday.
 
The 144 works, drawn in the last three years of the artist's life and in excellent condition, were stored in boxes atop a refrigerator in the suburban Los Angeles garage of a woman whose father-in-law was medical director at a state hospital where Ramirez was a patient.