More is an exhibition of new artworks by Las Vegas artist Krystal Ramirez. Working with textile sculpture, puzzles, and photography, Ramirez considers the value of protest, and proposes that interruptions to our accustomed ways of thinking can keep us anchored in reality.
Drawing on her family’s union background, she populates quilt-like grids with words found in historical protest photographs from UNLV Special Collections and Archives. Her use of Tyvek—a tough material typically used in construction—reinforces the connection between her goals as an artist and a family history of blue-collar labor.
“The conceptual fabric of Ramirez’s work resides in her understanding of protest as process: a means of overturning the utopian, ahistorical foundations of artistic abstraction and transforming them into a poetic declaration of anger and a call to action,” says Dr. Emmanuel Ortega, Marilynn Thoma Scholar and Assistant Professor in Art of the Spanish Americas at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She “reminds us that there can be no creative path forward without a rigorous reckoning with history and its enduring impact on contemporary society.”
Her grids refer back to the nested squares that the German American artist Josef Albers (1888-1976) used to test the effectiveness of small changes between different combinations of colors. Ramirez, a Mexican American artist, points out that Albers was inspired by the shapes in the precolonial architecture he saw in Mexico. Her geometric systems are both a cultural inheritance and an art-historical tool.
By treating words and letters like decorative elements that can be moved around in a colorful network, Ramirez creates what she calls “analog glitches” that invite viewers to pay conscious attention to the act of reading. Her work is a protest against contemporary A.I. technologies that tempt us to believe that knowledge acquisition is simple and quick.
October 23, 2026 - May 22, 2027
Marjorie Barrack Museum of Art
