Cache of Ramirez Drawings Discovered in Garage

NEW YORK—More than 100 drawings from the last three years of Martin Ramirez’s life, many of them dated and most in great shape, have been found after lying in a garage for almost two decades, reports the New York Times.

Brooke Davis Anderson, a curator at the American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan, flew to Peggy Dunievitz's house in Auburn, Calif., to see the drawings after Peggy's daughter-in-law Julia Dunievitz sent an unsolicited email to the museum inquiring about the hidden trove.

Peggy had Julia contact the museum in January after reading a newspaper article about the opening of its exhibition on Ramirez, a Mexican immigrant who lived in a California mental hospital for more than 30 years.

Peggy had been largely unaware of the artistic or monetary value of Ramirez works; his known body of work had numbered about 300 drawings and collages, some of which have sold for more than $100,000.

Peggy is the daughter-in-law of Max Dunievitz, who served in the early 1960s as medical director of Auburn's DeWitt State Hospital, where Ramirez lived for many years and died in 1963.

In the email, Julia wrote, “Max is no longer with us, but for the years he worked there, he knew Martín and supplied him with colored pencils and things for his art, and as a consequence my mother-in-law has a collection of Martín’s drawings.”

Peggy, 73, her son, Phil, 42, and his wife, Julia, are hoping to sell their newfound art collection, now represented by Frank Maresca and his gallery, Ricco/Maresca, and in safekeeping in a Brooklyn warehouse. They said they are also planning to donate at least three drawings to the Folk Art Museum and discussing using some of the money to honor Ramirez and his surviving relatives, who do not own any of his works and have never benefited from their rising value.

The Folk Art Museum is planning an exhibition of many of the new drawings for next October, which will show how Ramirez’s works matured, becoming more confident and abstract.

Phil had pulled the drawings from a trash pile, where they had been thrown his father’s 1988 death. Peggy had approached a curator at the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum in Williamsburg, Va., about the collection in the 1990s but never followed up.