Mel Ramos

Mel Ramos was born in Sacramento, California, in 1935 and died in 2018. Working chiefly in oil on canvas, he was associated with Pop art on the West Coast from the early 1960s, a period in which Pop offered a marked alternative to the then-dominant Abstract Expressionism. His paintings drew on superhero, comic, television and pulp media imagery, and he is identified among the California artists of that generation. The Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento holds The Atom (1962), a gift of Mr. and Mrs. Wayne Thiebaud, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum also records his work.