Michelle Ramin

Hailing from the mountains of North Central Pennsylvania, Michelle Ramin received her BA from Penn State University and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Ramin has exhibited nationally, including at Southern Exposure in San Francisco, SOHO20 Chelsea Gallery in NYC, Jonathan Ferrara Gallery in New Orleans, The Pennsylvania College of Technology, and Russo Lee Gallery in Portland, OR. Ramin’s work has been featured in such publications as New American Paintings, SF Weekly, Beautiful Decay, The Brooklyn Rail, and Art Ltd. Magazine, to name a few. Ramin has also been awarded the prestigious San Francisco Bay Guardian 2014 Goldie Award for Excellence in Visual Art, a fully funded solo exhibition as part of the Stumptown Artist Fellowship Program, numerous Clark College Professional Development grants, and, a jury prize in Brea Gallery’s 2023 "Made in California" exhibition. Michelle's work is also included in the Jimenez-Colon permanent collection in Puerto Rico as well as many other private collections across the country.

Beyond her work as an artist, Michelle has taught drawing and painting courses at the San Francisco Art Institute, City College of San Francisco, and Clark College in Vancouver, WA where she was also the Curator & Director of Archer Gallery and the Clark Art Talks artist and art scholar lecture series.

Michelle currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, and is Assistant Professor of Art and the Curator & Director of Norco College Art Gallery at Norco College.

In times of transition, I often return to the self-portrait. After the past few years of bombardment by Zoom calls, mobile news alerts, social media pings, and seemingly endless layers of open laptop windows, I chose to revisit drawing in color pencil - the medium I associate most with comfort, stability, and childhood wonder. Rendering my observed reality in broken yet contained, overlapping boxes has become a form of meditation; building this visual journal helps me process and analyze what’s in front of me, however disjointed. As each saturated rectangle upon rectangle screams with to-do lists - showing no clear delineation between physical, digital, and psychological space - this new body of work reveals how completely flooded my brain has become since the beginning of the pandemic. By sketching the virtual world out in detail and playing with the compositions through my personal lens of the everyday, I discover a sense of control and, on the good days, peace and calm.