Texas Border Business
McALLEN, Texas – Art students at South Texas College can expect to step right into the spirit of the border region, according to new adjunct professor of art Alexis Ramos.
Well-known in the Valley art community as an acclaimed ceramicist and curator, Ramos will now begin teaching Art Appreciation and Art History to students with a local twist.
Her teaching will not only reflect her own work, which is steeped in folk remedies and traditions that are significant to the Rio Grande Valley, but will also represent the Hispanic culture through color, texture and especially food.
“The beautiful part about South Texas College and what I enjoyed when I was a student here was that I could feel my professors’ hand in their content the same way that I can tell the difference between my grandmother’s potato salad and my tia’s potato salad,” Ramos said. “Every teacher has some freedom to incorporate and engage their students from their ethnocentric lens and that’s really important to teaching.”
She added, “Technology grows. Culture grows. Language grows. And I believe that so should our content.”
Born in Weslaco, Ramos said she began her education as an STC culinary student at the Mid-Valley campus in Weslaco in 2009, which laid the foundation for her future work in the arts, especially in ceramics.
Ramos said those years spent studying Culinary Arts enabled her to fuse traditional cake decorating techniques with ceramic sculpture to create realistic-looking treats and food items. Her focus changed, however, when she took an Art Appreciation course with current Associate Art Professor Rachael Brown.
The course “broke her brain,” according to Ramos, and it would be the same course she would return to teach in 2022.
“The one thing about art appreciation is you are meant to break their (students) brain. It’s their first introduction, they’re often non-majors and it’s often their first experience with art,” Ramos said. “You’re teaching them how to look at the world through this alternative lens…and that just stayed with me. The teachers that I experienced here became such a great family that I knew I wanted to go into teaching. It was never something that wasn’t going to happen.”
Ramos would eventually receive her associate degree from STC in Art in 2013. She then received her bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts with a focus on 3D and materials from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and finally a Master’s in Fine Arts degree (MFA) in Studio 3D, 2D and an art history certificate, also from UTRGV.
Her Candidate Graduate Exhibition “Recetas, Remedios, y Raíces” was highly regarded as it sought to explore the local culture’s relationships with food, religion, folk medicine and those kitchen curanderas who pass on the traditions.
“I have always been drawn to art. It started in the kitchen. Cooking is chemistry. There’s a saying in the culinary world that says ‘you can teach an artist to bake, but you can’t teach a baker to be an artist,” she said. “Art is something innate, and it’s all about passion and drive and the willingness to create, and it was kind of like that for me from a researcher standpoint.”
Ramos said her passion for education and art were merged during her first job experience at STC’s Mid-Valley campus where she assisted the library by organizing the various art exhibitions professors would require for capstone classes.
She then worked in the campus woodshop laboratory where she tutored students on proper use of lab materials and equipment like compound miter saws.
While pursuing her master’s degree from UTRGV, Ramos said she worked as the main gallery technician putting the various exhibitions together as well as helping art education students in an exhibition capacity by showing them how to showcase their work.
She formerly curated the city of Edinburg’s Women’s Art Exhibit in 2021, which was held to highlight the work of Rio Grande Valley female artists.
“I love the process of learning. I can do metal casting. I know more about a woodshop than the people that work at Home Depot. My background originally started with food and observation and the process, and that’s still tacked on to this day,” Ramos said. “I think it’s really important to show students that anything’s possible and when they arrive in my class they are going to learn a lot of different things from a lot of different perspectives.”
