Ramersey’s prolific art has long been hidden.that’s starting to change

In the early 1980s, New York artist Ramelsey made two trips to Los Angeles with his friend Jean-Michel Basquiat. His second in March 1983 inspired Basquiat’s painting ‘Hollywood Africans’ in his permanent collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It immortalizes himself and the artist Toxic, with Rammelzee wearing a Terminator-like wraparound mirror shade.

An earlier trip in late 1982 produced another compelling artwork. It’s a photo of the duo standing on the Santa Monica Boulevard median taken by Stephen Toughton, who has worked closely with both men over the years as an assistant and impresario. “The title of the picture is ‘Jean-Michel and Ramelsey Leaving Maxfield,'” Taunton says. They had just visited a clothing store in Melrose and were wearing the clothes they had purchased. Ramersey, dressed in a long coat, poses with a grin.

Stylish, streetwear, effortlessly cool, and full of attitude, these two artists made a huge impact in very different ways. Basquiat through the immense fame that accompanied his rapid artistic success. Ramersey had a huge impact on hip hop culture and helped him emerge. For decades, Rammelzee’s prolific and utterly unique body of work has been kept under wraps. That is starting to change.

Rammellzee named his vision Gothic Futurism. This is a fitting title for a major retrospective exhibition (running through January 14) at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, where he died in 2010 at the age of 49. He will return to Hollywood. Works in the exhibition include more than 60 of his paintings on canvas, cardboard, wood and even carpet. Some are three-dimensional, some are resin-coated, and they are packed with information, layered with text and swirls of his spray paint.

Installation view of “Rammellzee: Gothic Futurism” at Jeffrey Dietsch in Los Angeles.

(Joshua White / Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles)

“I’m sure,” he says, “that if you hang one of these works by Ramersey next to Kandinsky’s Jackson Pollock, one of the great abstract painters of our time, it can stand.” increase. Up. “

The show’s centerpiece is the 21 Garbage Gods, elaborate, life-size, full-body costumes meticulously crafted from the remnants of modern life. Max Wolf, former director of his Red Bull Gallery in New York City, who curated a major retrospective, Rammellzee: Racing for Thunder, in 2018, describes costumes as “far more ceremonial than works of art”. ” is expressed.

Constructed as living sculptures that Ramerjee was made to wear during his performance as MC, each had their own personality, mannerisms and modes of movement. This cast of superheroes and supervillains lived in a sprawling cosmic space opera of his own devising. These were also created in miniature maquette as a proof of concept for potential action figures.

“Traxx”, one of Rammelzee’s Garbage Gods, made out of found objects.

(Joshua White / Rammellzee Real Estate and Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles)

Upon meeting Rammellzee in person, he immediately fell under the influence of his charisma, which conveyed a dizzying array of information, philosophical, historical, cultural yet not personal.

By his own account, he first started graffitiing trains at the age of nine, stole keys from his father, a New York City traffic cop, in his Far Rockaway home in Queens, and stole them in train yards at night. Accessed. By the age of 19, he had officially retired from that activity, sent a “resignation” letter to the Department of Transportation, enrolled in a program for high school dropouts at Manhattan’s Fashion Institute of Technology, and began doing complex work with markers on board ships. ran. .

At some point, he became involved with the New York branch of the Nation of Islam, the Five Percent Nation, and began calling himself Ramerjee. Not a name he would have a hard time explaining, but an equation—RAM multiplied by his altitude to powers of Z—and the “formation of military functions” he embodied. His early struggle with the authorities to write on the train folded into an epic tale of eternal war between the guardians of knowledge and language and those who seek to hide and destroy it. He gave this art movement, his personal art movement, an aptly belligerent name: Ikonoklast Panzerism.

An all-rounder in the early hip-hop scene, Ramersey was an honorary member of the legendary B-boy group Rock Steady Crew and may be the first Five Percent to rock a mic. He wore a trench coat and a microphone in one hand and a microphone in the other at his concert closing the seminal hip-hop film Wildstyle at his East River Amphitheater in October 1981. I was caught holding a shotgun in my hand. His weapon was made of plastic, Toughton says. “Everyone in the audience thought he was going to shoot.”

Ramelsey’s mixed media work The Bans of Steel With the Naked Eye (1985).

(Joshua White / Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles)

Nick Taylor, who played in Basquiat’s noise rock group Gray and was a friend of both artists, recalls Ramelsey’s visit to Basquiat’s loft studio. “We listened to Ram’s incredibly extreme ideas and looked at each other in complete amazement,” he says.

In 1983, Basquiat produced a ten-minute hip-hop record called “Beat Bop.” Adopting multiple voices and personas, this is a street-corner story that sees Rameljee as the first significant rapper. The song has been heavily sampled by Beastie Boys and Cypress Hill, among others. His DJ Muggs at Cypress Hill, who moved to East LA from Queens, NY when he was 9, recalls hearing this record. “Everybody was into disco back then,” he says. “People weren’t talking about sniffing cocaine, or holding guns, or smoking weed… This was kind of psychedelic.”

The breakup between Ramelsey and Basquiat came about because, according to Basquiat’s longtime girlfriend Suzanne Marouk, “Ramelsey shared Jean’s newfound success with other artists of color and their Because I felt that I should try to open the door for the sake of it.” Ramersey later dismissed Basquiat’s work as “scribbling.”

During the 90s and 2000s, Ramelsey was out of the public eye and out of the art world. He worked alone in his upstairs walk-up his loft his space in Tribeca, New York. He was called Battle Station. After his death, it was painstakingly recreated as part of his Art in the Streets in collaboration with his late wife Carmella his Zagari. , a major survey of street art curated by Deitch during his tenure at the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA.

Ramersey in 1987.

(Peter Gramberg / Rammellzee Real Estate and Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles)

An attempt to put on a show with Ramelsey a few years before his death was hampered by his insistence on pouring toxic resin to prepare the work on the spot at the gallery. There was toughness and aggression, and that’s a big part of the job.”

There is a sense that Ramerjee, who wanted his work to be seen and was an iconoclast to the end, was determined to protect his work until he was no more. A sign hung on the door of Battle’s station read, “Whoever dies with a lot of toys wins.” Ramerjee certainly did. Those toys are now being given to the world to play with.