Bechtler Exhibit Celebrates Multi-Faceted Career of Virginia Jaramillo

Throughout a career lasting nearly seven decades, visual artist Virginia Jaramillo has remained a pioneer. 

Among other accomplishments, Jaramillo was the first Mexican American woman to exhibit abstract paintings in a US museum and the only woman included in one of the first racially integrated art shows in America, the 1971 DeLuxe Show in Houston. 

Despite breaking those barriers, Jaramillo has often been left out of the conversation about the most iconic Latin American visual artists. 

Now 86 years old, Jaramillo is experiencing a surge of interest in the bold, large-scale abstract canvases she painted in the 1970s, the meticulous handmade paperworks she turned to in the 1980s, and her most recent paintings, which are inspired by sacred geography and archeology.

With Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence, the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art spotlights the major phases of the artist’s work. The show, which launched in June 2023 at Kansas City’s Kemper Museum, is the first solo retrospective of Jaramillo’s work. The exhibit runs at Bechtler through June 8. 

Does it bother her that it took so long for someone to put together such an exhibit? Not at all, as she told interviewer Barbara Calderón in 2023: “I just kept working.” 

Six phases of Virginia Jaramillo’s art and their inspirations

“[Virginia Jaramillo] has defied categorization,” says Katia Zavistovski, Bechtler’s curator of modern and contemporary art, noting that the artist first made her mark in abstract art, a field then dominated by male artists. 

Then, just as Jaramillo started receiving acclaim for her minimalist paintings, she shifted to handmade paperworks, which her contemporaries did not perceive as being in the same league as painting and sculpture. 

Zavistovski, who organized the museum’s presentation of the exhibit, says the show contains “six main bodies” of Jaramillo’s work. The earliest of these bodies of work are Jaramillo’s Black Paintings series, made with limited time and materials while the El Paso, Texas-born artist was living in Los Angeles with her husband, Black American painter and sculptor Daniel LaRue Johnson.

“The Black Paintings appear like cracked, dry, desert landscapes,” Zavistovski says. Jaramillo has said the paintings were influenced by her early childhood memory of visiting her grandparents’ turkey farm in Southern California.

“[Jaramillo] recalled riding her bike over very dry, cracked earth, and remembering the squeaking of her bicycle wheels,” Zavistovski notes, adding that more pressing images may also have influenced the dark, textured paintings. The 1965 Watts Uprising, a protest against the racist and abusive practices of the Los Angeles Police Department, engulfed the Black neighborhood of Watts at the time Jaramillo was working on the Black Paintings.

“I think that the macabre nature of those paintings was partially influenced by the turbulent political climate, and … scorched areas of the city from the Watts Rebellion,” Zavistovski offers.

The Paris Paintings followed, stemming from a year Jaramillo and her husband Daniel LaRue Johnson spent in Paris after Johnson received a Guggenheim Foundation Grant to study in the City of Light

“She started to introduce color — reds, greens, and oranges — into her work,” Zavistovski says. 

Jaramillo also experimented with materials on this batch of paintings, smearing a mixture of paint, beeswax and gesso on her canvases. The Paris Paintings are significantly smaller than the Black Paintings because Jaramillo wanted to be able to transport them easily back to the States.

Back in the US, the couple settled in New York, where Jaramillo started work on her groundbreaking Curvilinear Paintings, in which thin, curving lines snake across expanses of bright, flat monochromatic color.

“They’re known as her signature paintings,” says Zavistovski, who notes that the Curvilinear series was inspired by the Japanese concept of Ma, which Jaramillo discovered at an exhibition of Edo period (1603-1868) prints at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

“Ma is the emptiness in between things,” Zavistovski says. “Rather than it being just negative space, it’s a kind of generative space [coming] from emptiness.”

With her subsequent Stained Paintings, Jaramillo moved away from the opaque paint used in her Curvilinear series to more watered-down pigments.

“She allowed the pigments to stain into the canvases and to drip up and down,” Zavistovski notes. “She was moving the canvases in such a way that the [paint] drips would go in one direction and then the other.” As a result, the aqueous Stained Paintings convey a watery feel.

Jaramillo’s interest in space and geometry came to fruition in her handmade paperworks. Here she made the canvas work as art rather than just acting as a substrate for layers of paint.

“Her shift to paper … was kind of kismet,” Zavistovski says. “It just so happened that Jaramillo’s Spring Street studio was only a few blocks away from the Dieu Donné paper mill.” 

Jaramillo befriended Dieu Donné in 1978 and learned how to craft handmade sheets of paper by mixing linen pulp with water and straining it onto screens to dry.

By pouring layers of the pulp into custom molds, Jaramillo compressed multiple sheets together and experimented with the density of paper. The textured, layered and watermarked sheets absorbed varying amounts of pigment.

“It strikes me how painterly the paperworks are,” Zavistovski notes. “They connect to the paintings that came before and also the ones that came after.” 

In some ways, the tactile handmade paperworks stretch all the way back to Jaramillo’s earliest canvases, the cracked and textured Black Paintings.

In 2016, Jaramillo returned to painting with yet another approach.

“A lot of these [recent] paintings are geometric in nature, so they refer back to the Curvilinear Paintings,” Zavistovski says. 

Many are also based on the landscape of ancient archeological sites.

“A lot of [the paintings] are named for the coordinates of actual places,” Zavistovski notes, adding that one painting has a string-of-coordinates title that is the location for Stonehenge. 

Why Jaramillo matters

“Jaramillo is a pioneering artist who has been overshadowed,” Zavistovski says, noting that her work has not been widely exhibited in the South. 

She believes Jaramillo went underrecognized and was assigned an outsider status until recently due to three factors. On one hand, Jaramillo worked in abstract art, a field dominated by her male counterparts. In fact, when Jaramillo showed her earliest work in Los Angeles, she signed her work with the gender neutral “V. Jaramillo” so that people wouldn’t realize that she was a woman. 

Jaramillo was not often included in past scholarship involving Latin American artists because her work was abstract, minimalist and not representational. She didn’t delve into stereotypical Latin American subject matter like faith, family, indigenous spirituality or immigration.

“Maybe it’s because I don’t do altars or clay figurines,” Jaramillo told Calderón in 2022 when asked why she wasn’t historically included with Latin women artists.

Additionally, though Jaramillo has been politically engaged throughout her personal life — living as a Mexican-American woman in an interracial marriage and contributing to the feminist journal Heresies in the 1970s and 80s — her art itself is not overtly political, while politics is another subject traditionally expected of Latin artists.

“The fact that this is her first solo museum retrospective says a lot,” Zavistovski says. “She has been excluded from various art historical narratives [due to] the intersection of her identity as a Mexican American, an abstract artist and a woman.”

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Principle of Equivalence aims to rectify that glaring and longstanding oversight.

“It’s wonderful that Jaramillo’s career is finally getting the attention that it deserves,” Zavistovski says. 

It’s recognition that has been earned through decades of inspiration, innovation, hard work and the spark of genius.