Virginia Jaramillo is an artist whose career spans over six decades, from her first exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from 1959 to 1961 to her major retrospective in 2023 and beyond. Discover her early years, inspirations, and accolades.
Virginia Jaramillo (b. 1939, El Paso, Texas) is a defining abstract artist whose remarkable career spans nearly seven decades. Working across a wide range of media—including oil and acrylic painting, ink on paper, handmade paper, collage, and fresco—Jaramillo is widely recognized as one of the most significant postwar Mexican American women in abstract art. Her practice is marked by material innovation and a masterful use of color, exploring landscape in its topographical, archaeological, cosmic, and philosophical dimensions through the lens of physics, science, mythology, and modernist thought.
Born on March 21, 1939, in El Paso, Texas, Jaramillo was raised in Los Angeles, California. Surrounded by mountains and ocean in a desert valley, she developed a deep connection to the land from an early age. Though she initially dreamed of becoming an archaeologist, she discovered her talent for drawing and pursued art with the encouragement of her parents. In 1954, she enrolled at the renowned Manual Arts High School—whose alumni include Jackson Pollock, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Philip Guston. There, a perceptive teacher recognized her abilities and took her and other students on weekend visits to the studio of modernist designers Charles and Ray Eames, shaping her early exposure to design philosophies and abstraction.
Jaramillo came of age during a time of growing civil rights activism in Los Angeles. By the time she graduated high school in 1959, communities of color were facing widespread discrimination and violence. That same year, her painting Satire was accepted into the annual exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. To avoid gender bias, she signed the work “V. Jaramillo.” Following the exhibition, she briefly studied at the Otis Art Institute (now Otis College of Art and Design), but left when she felt its curriculum didn’t support her interest in abstraction and contemporary art.
In 1960, she married artist Daniel LaRue Johnson and soon after began a family. She continued submitting work to juried museum shows, and her painting San Pedro Steel Mill (c. 1962)—a geometric, cubist-inspired depiction of a manufacturing plant made using melted crayons—was included in the Southwest Regional Painting and Sculpture Show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. This work showed early signs of her fascination with structure, innovative materials, and modern abstraction.
In Los Angeles, Jaramillo developed a significant early body of work known as the Black Paintings—minimal compositions created from emulsified powdered gesso and rabbit skin glue layered with dark-toned house paints. These works began her engagement with earth and cosmic themes, evident in their textured surfaces and titles such as Terra Mancha (1964) and Stonehenge (1964).
In 1965, Jaramillo and her family moved to Paris for a year. Though she produced little work during that time, she immersed herself in observing light and the natural world. During this period Jaramillo and Johnson also solidified their commitment to being full-time artists. Upon returning to the U.S., the family settled in New York City, where Jaramillo began her groundbreaking Curvilinear series. Influenced by the Eames’ philosophy of “less is more,” she explored how much could be removed from a composition while retaining its dynamism. Her Curvilinears were included in The De Luxe Show in Houston, Texas in 1971—one of the first racially integrated exhibitions in the U.S. Jaramillo was the only woman and the only Latina artist included. The following year, her Curvilinear, Green Dawn No. 1 (1971) was featured in the Whitney’s Annual Exhibition: Contemporary American Painting. This period marked a critical evolution in her work, as she translated myth, belief systems, and scientific theories into abstract landscapes that explored both visible and invisible worlds.
As her career progressed, Jaramillo turned to handmade paper, producing ambitious large-scale works at Dieu Donné Papermill’s studio in SoHo, near her home. Her first series, Visual Theorems, was completed in 1979. The studio’s longtime artistic director Paul Wong later remarked, “No one has ever made handmade papers like Virginia Jaramillo before. And no one has ever made anything like them since.” In a bold move, Jaramillo stopped painting entirely between 1979 and 2016, dedicating herself instead to exploring cosmic, ancient, and earthly themes through intricate, layered handmade paper compositions.
Throughout her long and varied career, Jaramillo’s work has drawn consistently from the language of landscapes—ancient, hidden, and cosmic. She once reflected, “Seeing the cracked earth and the colors of the earth always has influenced me. I would […] keep looking at the earth. Sometimes it was red and brown. Sometimes it was almost black. It’s about time, cosmic time.” For Jaramillo, a successful painting conveyed an idea or feeling of space between light and dark, structure and amorphous qualities, grounded earth and otherworldly cosmos, a reflection of the Japanese philosophy of ma. While always pushing herself into new territory, her contributions to abstraction—through both material innovation and conceptual frameworks of landscape and time—now hold a vital place in the canon of American minimalism.
Though her critical recognition came sporadically, Jaramillo was included in major exhibitions of American abstraction. Early on, her work was collected by institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. In recent years, major acquisitions have been made by the Brooklyn Museum, The Menil Collection, Baltimore Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Toledo Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. A retrospective, Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence, toured the United States from 2023 to 2025, originating at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and curated by Erin Dziedzic, with stops at MCA Chicago and the Bechtler Museum of Art.
Select awards and honors include a National Endowment Visiting Artist Grant (1977), an Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2020), and recognition from the Guild Hall Academy of the Arts (2023).
Virginia Jaramillo lives and works in Hampton Bays, New York.
