André Ramos-Woodard
Raised in the Southern states of Tennessee and Texas, André Ramos-Woodard (He/They) is a photo-based artist who uses their work to emphasize the experiences of the marginalized communities while accenting the repercussions of contemporary and historical discrimination. His art conveys ideas of communal and personal identity, influenced by their direct experience with life as a queer African American. Focusing on Black liberation, queer justice, and the reality of mental health, he aspires for his art to help bring power to the people.
RR: André! Good to have you. How is life and art after graduate school?
ARW: Yo!! Thanks so much for inviting me, Raul. I’ve got such a deep respect for the work you do, so it means a lot to be a part of this!
Life after grad school has been… hmm, a mix of wonderful and bleak, if I’m being honest. I graduated in Spring 2021, and right after I graduated I moved from Albuquerque, NM to Beaumont, TX to be closer to friends and family. I got pretty depressed afterwards, and I think it was due to just such a sudden change in my practice; I no longer had a studio to work in, I wasn’t constantly interacting with artists anymore, and frankly I didn’t even know what to create. I felt pretty stuck for a while, but thankfully I had loved ones around to support me and pick me up when I was at my lowest.
On a more positive note, I’ve solidified a few cool things since graduating–I had some solo exhibitions in Colorado and Missouri, won a fellowship at the Houston Center for Photography, and got to install a mural of my work at the Museum of Fine Arts–Houston! I also taught for a semester at my undergrad, Lamar University, before accepting the position of Exhibition and Programs Coordinator at the Houston Center for Photography (after being selected for the fellowship, I must add). Man, even though sometimes things have been stressful, I truly feel blessed about the opportunities that have been coming by way. I keep reminding myself to continue trying to put my work out into the world, and that art is the thing that really makes me the happiest.
RR: I'm glad to hear you are getting back into the groove of making after a period of readjustment and getting your feet under yourself. Your approach to making photographs and work is something I find really interesting. How did you come to combine images, digital drawings and text to present a new form within the medium?
ARW: Hmm, well to be honest, I don’t at all feel like I created a new form within photography. I mean, not gonna lie, I can’t think of many photocentric artists that implement digital illustration in their work, but there are some contemporary photo artists like Diego Moreno, Martin Wannam, and Geloy Concepcion who are all interrupting photography by combining it with various forms of text and drawing. Their works are all fire (I would put emojis there if I could lol). 🔥
But as for my specific process, I got to it by thinking hard about what I love about art. Ever since I was a kid, long before I got into photography, I was interested in drawing. I was so into anime and cartoons as a kid. Gosh, I remember being so mesmerized by all the character designs and their fantastical abilities. I was always drawing the characters I loved with my cousin, and I just kept doing that up until high school when I discovered photography. Fast forward a few years to me pursuing my graduate degree in photography, and I got to a point where the photographic medium felt stagnant to me. I was having problems saying what I wanted to say through images, so I started drawing a fuckton. I mean, my second semester in grad school was pretty much nothing but drawings. I eventually decided that there was no reason I couldn’t add all the mediums I love together, and that’s when I started doing research for a project I could investigate that would utilize both drawing and photography. From there, my project BLACK SNAFU was born!
RR: Your work also has an intuitive nature to it. It's a call and response and very direct. Could you describe this particular aspect of how you make and how intuition drives your work?
ARW: For sure! Well, most of the work I create is about how I feel or think, and I think intuition is part of expressing those things. Especially since discovering photography, I’ve found that art making for me has been so much about getting my thoughts out. That’s probably ‘cuz I’m a very emotional person, and I need to deal with that somehow; there are times when I have intense feelings about the world around me and the ways I gotta navigate it, and during those times the best way to get to the bottom of those emotions is by making something visual. To sum it up, In graduate school during a studio visit with my professor and mentor Patrick Manning (shout out to Patrick, I miss you!), he pointed out to me that pretty much all of the work I make deals with “my direct experience with life”. That’s kinda how I’ve put it ever since.
I’ve also tried my best to not place restrictions on myself when I’m making things. This means that if I wanna scream “FUCK!” from the rooftops, I’ma try to put that energy in my art. I see no point in pulling punches, especially when my work deals with severely critical themes, like race, mental health, and human equity.
RR: I'm glad you use the term human equity and I see that happening when you use historically racist cartoons to reclaim and empower your work, yourself and those it may affect. It feels like you are taking equity or power in the formation of those figures and redistributing it. It's one thing to have discourse on how history like that hurt others, it's another to use it and reclaim the pain they have produced. Could you talk about how you came to the illustrations?
ARW: Yeah, definitely. To mimic myself from a bit earlier, I started doing some research into African-American identity in illustration during my time in graduate school when I was preparing for my thesis project. I knew a lot more about the history of Black people in American photography by comparison, so I felt that it would be only necessary to absorb more of that history through the perspective of drawings and cartoons, especially since I planned to utilize that style in my work. That was when I quickly discovered the cultural significance of the old minstrel, popular in the early-to-mid 20th century. I remember being a bit startled by those vile lil’ depictions at first, too; it wasn’t like I had never seen them before, but knowing what little I did about their relationships to Black identity was enough to make me do a double-take.
I immediately recognized them for the negative portrayal of humanity that they are, but after further investigating I began to truly realize how impactful these stereotyped caricatures have been on societal views of Black people and other BIPOC communities. I’m a pretty strong believer in the idea that we have to face our history in order for us to learn from it, so my reappropriation of these characters feels very much like that. I’m throwing these characters into my work and into the faces of viewers so that we can reconcile with white supremacy’s nasty impact on our collective world view.
On that note, I also hope to remind people that these drawings are simply that; drawings. Marks on paper, ya know? And as far as the caricatures I reappropriate go, they’re just some old white racist’s idea of Black people, and that shit ain’t the truth. That’s why I feel like it’s important to juxtapose those drawings with other pro-Black characters, or photographs that speak authentically to Black identity–at least from my perspective.
RR: This work is also much about your own experience and identity. You're not only positioning the work towards viewers but also positioning yourself within that exchange. We are met with this history but also you, your history and your portrait. How do you bridge the personal and collective in your work?
ARW: Yo, thanks for this take! I think I put myself in the work for a couple important reasons. Well, one important reason and another more logical one.
First off, I am not the spokesperson for niggas. Nor would I ever wanna be! I ain’t cool enough for that. But in all seriousness, I can talk about Black identity as much as I want, but it’s never something that I can truly encapsulate. Blackness is vast and ever-changing; it’s so many things, experiences, and feelings, that I would be ludicrous to pretend that I can speak to all that! That being said, I can at the very least speak from my perspective. All the happiness and love I have for my Blackness and Black people–I feel like I can put that in my work when I put myself in the work, and I mean that by both making self-portraits and using my hand to draw on photographs.
Secondly, I’ma just be straight-up with you; it is a hell of a lot easier to put myself in front of the camera than asking someone else. I be scared to ask people sometimes, plus when you use someone else you gotta schedule things out and all that stuff. I’m actually trying to force myself to do a little more of that now, but sometimes when I have an idea, I just need to make it as soon as possible!
RR: Speaking on ways to incorporate others, do you want to give a shout out to and share some artists, photographers, makers that are inspiring to you? Spread the love!
ARW: Oh yesss!!! First off, shout out to my homegirl, partner-in-crime, and muse, Jennifer Marion. She is killing it in grad school right now; just finished up their first year and got Best-of-Show at an exhibition they recently were accepted into in Denton at UNT Colab! I love you, Jennifer! And shout outs to my boy Joshua Mokry, whose work blows my mind and just got into an exhibition in Seoul, Korea!
I’ve also been looking at Austin Cullen, Tay Butler, Alana Campbell, Veronica Gaona, Kerr Cirilo, Samantha Box, Trent Bozeman, Dominic McDuffie, Karen Lue, Terrell Halsey, Rana Young, Granville Carroll, Steph Foster, Jonas Yip… ah the list goes on and on right now. I’m blessed to be both a practicing artist currently working at a photo gallery, so there’s a lot of people I get to pay attention to.
RR: Awesome roster! And you collaborate on a project called “the space in between” with Jennifer Marion right? Tell me about this project and how it came to be? What's in it for the future?
ARW: the space in between (tsib) is an online gallery that Jennifer and I started during the summer of 2021. I was fresh outta graduate school and she had just gotten her BFA a few months prior, so both of us were missing the community that was built from being around a bunch of artists in school. Plus, this was when COVID-19 was still heavily impacting physical interaction, so we decided to cultivate a sense of community within the constraints of not being able to go out and see people face-to-face. We figured that since we both loved looking at art and that it could be fun to showcase people’s work online, and that’s how tsib was born!
Through our website, we host free calls for entries for juried exhibitions and artist interviews with the winners of those exhibitions. We pay all our top placing entrants, too, and while it may not be a whole lot, we don’t have any outside funding other than GoFundMe donations, meaning a lot of this comes straight from our pockets. I mean, we do what we gotta do! Our mission is to specifically highlight the artwork of emerging and under-represented artists, meaning that we don’t showcase artists who have gallery representation or works collected by large, public institutions at the time of entry. There’s a shit ton of amazing creatives out there making things, so we feel that it’s important to focus our attention on those that don’t really have some of the bigger accolades that inevitably puts eyes on their work.
For the future, we’re still figuring it out. We plan to keep hosting online exhibitions and interviewing artists, but since Jennifer and I both have full-time jobs (being a graduate student is a full-time job IMO), it’s hard to really expand too far beyond that–I’m sure you understand that since you’re in school while running Deep Red Press! We do hope that one day the gallery will be able to have a physical space, but that's a big ole aspiration. Only time will tell!
RR: Are there any other projects you are looking forward to working on next?
ARW: Hmm, well I’ve recently been making work for a newer project called what it’s like to feel, so that’s been pretty cool. It’s much more “photographic” than my normal work, so that challenge has been fun to undertake. Other than that, just working at HCP and tryna get someone to pay me to be an artist, haha. Entering calls when I can and just tryna focus on bettering my mental health.
RR: That for sure. Well thanks André! Looking forward to the fruition of all your projects!
ARW: Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me and including me in the hard work you do, Raul. I have so much respect for you, both as an amazing working photographer and as editor for Deep Red Press. Looking forward to speaking more with you in the future!