The exhibition Martín Ramírez, on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum October 6, 2007¿January 13, 2008, is the first major retrospective in nearly twenty years dedicated to the complex, multilayered drawings of this Mexican self-taught artistic. The show was curate by Brooke David, Curator and Director of the American Folk Art Museum Contemporary Center, were the show was exhibited first. This holistic exhibition reconsiders the long-held classification of Ramírez as a ¿schizophrenic artist¿ and presents his drawings in a major metropolitan museum alongside artists in the art-historical canon, as works of artistic quality and merit. A legend among self-taught artists, Ramírez¿who spent his adult life as an indigent inmate in two mental hospitals in California, diagnosed a catatonic schizophrenic¿created drawings that serve as powerful illustrations of one man¿s determination to communicate and to rise above his circumstances. His detailed works, produced in the face of profound and fundamental barriers, are rich with expressive power, ¿like visual diaries of Ramírez¿s life,¿ according to Brooke Davis Anderson. Martín Ramírez features approximately eighty of the artist¿s drawings on paper, gathered from public museums and private collections around the world, and includes several works never before seen by the public. The exhibition is organized to highlight the development of four of Ramírez¿s themes: the horse and rider, trains in tunnels, religious figures, and landscapes¿all of which stem from Ramírez¿s memories of life prior to being institutionalized. Wall labels by five separate scholars provide diverse perspectives on the multifaceted nature of Ramírez¿s artistic production. Gallery guides in both Spanish and English make this and more information available to the public in take-away form.