In this episode of The Truth In This Art, the guest is Bony Ramirez!

About Bony Ramirez: Dominican-born artist based out of Jersey City, New Jersey, working across painting, sculpture, and installation to create a vivid celebration and exploration of Dominican life and Caribbean culture. Blending European painting traditions — Renaissance and Mannerist influences drawn from church art — with distinctly Caribbean imagery, symbolism, and materials, Ramirez has built a visual language entirely his own. His elongated, exaggerated figures function almost like landscapes, each one deliberately distinct, never referencing real people but instead pulling from memory and imagination.

In our conversation, Ramirez talks through moving to the United States at 13 years old and how that transition shaped both his identity and his relationship to the culture he left behind. He reflects on how being physically close to New York City's art scene, including a stretch living in Harlem, became an essential part of his growth as an artist. Ramirez discusses his responsibility to tell Caribbean stories that are still underrepresented in contemporary art, noting how many people don't even know where his island is.

He gets into how his figures evolved — starting from self-taught limitations that became a stylistic signature — and why he keeps cultural markers like plantains, machetes, and crabs, along with bilingual English and Spanish titles, at the forefront of his work, refusing to let that world fade into the background.

Be sure to follow Bony Ramirez on Instagram at @bonyramirezz to keep up with his work and future projects.

Photo courtesy of subject.

The Truth In This Art is supported by William G. Baker, Jr. Memorial Fund, the Maryland State Arts Council's Creativity Grant and Mayor's Individual Artist Award - Creative Baltimore Fund (Baltimore). 

Host: Rob Lee
Music: Original music by Daniel Alexis Music with additional music from Chipzard and TeTresSeis.
Production: