In reflection on the last 10 weeks, I was enlightened to the stories that the MiraCosta campus holds. Meeting the students and hearing their interests was truly fun, and took me back to my days sitting in their seats as a first-year college student. I can say I learned a lot from my time working with the students, and my fellow class mates in preparation for the Oral History I conducted.
Finding a narrator was an intimidating process. “How do I know this is the person I want to have a conversation with?”. My research began with asking myself what areas I am interested in that have relation to the work of the ROHP, and uniquely, I feel on art. Murals around San Diego show visual renditions of stories, of history’s longer and more recent past, sitting there, constantly speaking to us but rarely do we listen to. I was inspired and compelled to find a narrator in the Oceanside area that was a practicing artist.
I found Dean Ramos’s online portfolio through the Oceanside Museum of Art’s past exhibitions, where his sculpture was featured in an exhibition entitled “Divisions”. The art stood out to me, and questions began to fill my mind as to what these figurative sculptures could mean. Turns out, Dean Ramos is a professor of painting and drawing at Mira Costa College.
Our conversation was heavily centered on his art, and specifically the “Divisions” exhibition. I was impressed with his level of intentionality and thought towards the backstory behind these pieces. After the interview, I was enlightened to the power and wonder art can hold, and its relation to the artist’s own story can become quite clear the more you get to know the story behind the art, and the story behind the artist.
Overall, I enjoyed greatly the process of getting deeply curious about someone else’s life and journey and understanding what brought them to the place they are today. The arts and ethics are two fields that are deeply interconnected, and Ramos’s art will reveal such possibilities when we consider the internal experiences that exist between people, cultures, and groups. Art has a surprising ability to reveal the universal experiences, that connect us all.
