HOUSTON, TX.- Including works made over the past 25 years, Atlas, Plural, Monumental is artist Paul Ramírez Jonas’s first survey exhibition in the Americas. It features sculpture, photography, video, drawing, and his signature participatory works that demonstrate how Ramírez Jonas is redefining public art through an innovative practice that considers how artworks galvanize the formation of new communities.

Ramírez Jonas utilizes unlikely sources, such as scientific experiments, and treats them as “scores” that he creatively reinterprets. When his faithful reproductions of kites designed by the inventors Alexander Graham Bell and Joseph Lecornu took to the air, they carried alarm clocks Ramírez Jonas re-engineered to trigger the shutter of a single-use disposable camera. The resulting photographs—each paired with their kite—capture images of the artist on the ground. While the kites can be appreciated for their sculptural form, the photographs exhibited alongside them act as proof of their aerial capability. Ramírez Jonas’s kites prove the functionality of Graham Bell and Lecornu’s designs and simultaneously document the artist’s actions. In other instances Ramírez Jonas presents museum visitors with the opportunity to participate in his “scores.” In His Truth is Marching On (1993), the public is invited to use a mallet to tap a hanging chandelier of water-filled wine bottles, whose successive musical notes produce a rendition of the anthem, The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

In 2005, Ramírez Jonas shifted his focus toward more decidedly public forms, including monuments, keys to the city, and public pronouncements. If monuments commonly memorialize singular individuals or events with immutable proclamations in bronze or marble, Ramírez Jonas provides us with memorable, yet mutable, alternatives. The Commons (2011) is a riderless equestrian statue crafted entirely from cork, and the public is invited to attach messages to its base with pushpins. In creating a sculpture that accommodates a diversity of messages rather than the singular voice of the state, Ramírez Jonas’s engaging work acts to democratize this form. In another participatory work, Public Trust (2016-ongoing), audience members make a promise that is recorded in a drawing shared with its maker and with the visiting public via marquee signage in the gallery. The work encourages participants and the audience to consider the impact of their word on the community and individually. Local Houston performers and educators will activate Public Trust each Saturday during the exhibition.

Ramírez Jonas’s work galvanizes connections between the personal, the collective, and the public, making them concrete and observable. Manifested in visually, materially, and conceptually compelling forms, Ramírez Jonas’s work invigorates our cultural commons by inviting the public to reflect on and engage with public art in inventive and surprising ways.

Paul Ramírez Jonas was born in 1965 in California. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He has had solo exhibitions at The Exploratorium, San Francisco (2014); Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo, Brazil (2011); The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2008); The Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas (2007); at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England (2004) and Cornerhouse, Manchester, England (2004). He has also exhibited with Koenig & Clinton (NYC); Roger Björkholmen (Sweden); Galeria Nara Roesler (São Paulo); and Postmasters Gallery (NYC).

His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum (NYC), P.S.1. Contemporary Art Center (NYC), and The New Museum (NYC), and at The Whitechapel (London), the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), and the Kunsthaus Zurich (Switzerland). Ramírez Jonas also participated in the 1st Johannesburg Biennale, the 1st Seoul Biennial, the 6th Shanghai Biennial, the 28th Sao Paulo Biennial, the 53rd Venice Biennial, and the 7th Bienal do Mercosul, Porto Alegre, Brazil. His works are included in the collections of the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; Bronx Museum, New York, NY; Columus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; New Museum, New York, NY; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, New York, NY; and Malmö Konstmuseum, Malmö, Sweden.