Sandra Ramos is without a doubt one of the most important contemporary Cuban artists in the world and her challenging artwork has been exhibited worldwide in many museums and galleries. She will represent Cuba in the coming VIII Havana Bienal.

Ramos studied at the prestigious San Alejandro Art Academy in Havana and later the Superior Institute of Art, also in Havana.

She has exhibited and curated several exhibitions in several Havana Bienals, starting with the third Bienal in 1989, but it was in 1993 that her work began to get noticed by international curators and dealers. It was in that year that Ramos won the grand prize in the National Printmakers Salon in Havana and she was invited to exhibit at the First International Printmakers Biennial in Maastricht, Holland and the International Printmakers Triennial at the Alvar Aalto Museum in Finland.

Her work addresses many taboos of contemporary Cuban society, such as migration, and the resulting separation of families and loss of loved ones, racism and issues dealing with liberties and rights. The works on exhibition at the Fraser Gallery are from that groundbreaking 1993 series that put Ramos on the international art scene. Ramos' art is remarkable enough on its artistic merit alone. But it is even more so because she's a leading edge, vanguard artist inside Cuba, part of a generation that in the past decade has attempted to break through some of the constraints of censorship and made art, music, movies and authored works reflective of the starkness of Cuban reality.

Prints from this important series are currently in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Grafik Museum in Bad Steben, Germany, the National Royal Museum of Art in Ontario, Canada and many others.

Ramos’ works have been also exhibited at many important international exhibitions such as Art Basel, Art Chicago and ARCO in Madrid. Also in Japan, Mexico, Italy, Spain, Germany, Holland, Finland, Switzerland, Canada, India, Venezuela, Spain, Brazil, France, England, Israel, Argentina, Ecuador, Dominican Republic, and the United States. Among her many awards, she was recently granted a residency at the Fuchu Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan and also at the Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation in New York. She has also earned fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy and the Barbican Center, London, England.

This exhibition was Sandra Ramos' debut in the Greater Washington area. Her original artwork is available through the Fraser Gallery of Washington, DC and Bethesda, Maryland.