CITYSCAPES / MATEA GOLD : A Portrait of a Man Who Infuses His Teaching With Art

Jose Ramirez’s classroom at Esperanza Elementary School is bursting with color.

The usual fifth-grade materials hanging on the wall--the multiplication tables, map of the world and list of class rules--are overshadowed by 30 crayon self-

portraits that paper Room 13.

“I like school,” reads a picture of a grinning girl. “I like to draw,” reads a drawing of a boy with blue shorts.

A large painting of the Pico-Union elementary school and the downtown skyline wraps around one corner of the room. A student-drawn mural of the solar system hangs along a nearby wall, the swirling blue and red planets bright against a purple-black sky. Colorful paper cubes depicting Native American life spin from the ceiling, like mobiles over a baby’s crib.

On the blackboard, under “Homework,” Ramirez has written: “Finish Drawings/Writings.”

Ramirez has taken a stand against the tide of budget cuts that have depleted the arts in public schools during the last two decades. The young teacher and artist has infused his reading, history and science lessons with drawing and painting, incorporating art into almost every subject.

Using the classroom’s tempera paints and a tin of crayons that Ramirez has collected for years, his students sketch pictures of new vocabulary words. They illustrate scenes from their history lessons. They study pre-Columbian art to learn about symmetry and proportion.

“With other teachers, you just write,” said Fredy Penaloza, 9. “But with Mr. Ramirez it’s much better, because we get to do art too.”

Ramirez scorns art lessons that involve handing out dittos to be colored. Instead, he talks passionately of aesthetics, of art history, of “visualizing the written word.”

He shows his classes slides of Maya pyramids and National Geographic photos and Frida Kahlo paintings. They study surrealism, take field trips to art galleries and visit murals he has painted on the Eastside.

From this, Ramirez says, the students learn self-esteem, teamwork and hand-eye coordination--and are able to master the rest of their curriculum as well.

“People don’t realize art is such a powerful tool,” said Ramirez, 32. “If you want to get kids to really learn, you get them to do art.”

When Ramirez applied for a position at Esperanza earlier in the year, Principal Deborah Ignagni was amazed at the student art portfolios he showed her from classes he had taught at other public schools in Los Angeles. Her students are lucky to have him, she said.

“His manner and way of teaching make them proud of what they accomplish,” she said. “It empowers them to be creative.”

For years, arts programs have declined at public schools. Painting, theater and dance were viewed as frills as districts such as Los Angeles Unified struggled with declining budgets.

But in July, the L.A. district approved a $4.7-million increase in arts funding. Soon, teachers at 54 pilot elementary schools, including Esperanza, will be trained to incorporate visual and performing arts into their lesson plans. Visiting teachers will provide theater and dance lessons. Every school in the district will receive extra money to buy art textbooks and supplies.

Eventually, district officials hope to expand the arts curriculum to every school and encourage more teachers to try what Ramirez has been doing on his own since he started teaching seven years ago.

Ramirez grew up in El Sereno, his childhood saturated by the colors of the neighborhood murals and the Chicano art movement. His parents, a carpet layer and seamstress, both emigrated from Mexico. He spent his summers with his grandmother in Jalisco and took trips to Mexico City, where he was awed by the large Aztec pyramids.

He took his first stab at art as a teenager, when he received a scholarship to attend an elite private boarding school in Arizona. There a teacher praised his work in art class, and a light went on. He started experimenting with painting and sculpting.

When he was an art student at UC Berkeley, some professors criticized his work as “too Mexican”--words that Ramirez said gave him even more determination to succeed.

Soon his acrylic paintings were showing in local galleries. He came back to Los Angeles and displayed his work wherever he could: in friends’ homes, coffeehouses, small art shows. He has had several shows in New York, and his work is featured prominently on posters and murals on the Eastside.

Ramirez’s pieces pulsate with color. Rich greens, reds and yellows mark his portraits of life in Los Angeles. Some images are dark, apocalyptic: a police car chasing a skeleton, the Los Angeles skyline glowing red with fire. In another painting, a father holds his infant in a warm embrace. A group of women pray. A family gathers together in a garden.

Recently, as he waited for his wife to deliver their second child, Ramirez painted tender images of pregnant women.

“I feel a responsibility to my community to offset these negative images and stereotypes you see through television or the news,” he said. “Underneath it all, I want to show people struggling and living.”

When he graduated from Berkeley, Ramirez said, he thought teaching would be a good day job to help support his art. He started working as a substitute, then eventually got his teaching credential from Cal State L.A.

Now, working with his 30 fifth-graders, almost all recent immigrants, keeps him “humbled and grounded,” Ramirez said.

Every evening, he leaves Esperanza filled with his students’ stories, tales of war-torn Central American countries, of fleeing immigration officers, of poverty. For two, three hours a night, he sits at home in El Sereno and paints the colors of their world.

Every morning, he faces the class renewed.

“How many artists can say, ‘I taught a kid how to read today?’ ” he said.

On a recent Monday morning, Ramirez watched as student Mateo Pascual knelt in front of the solar system mural and painstakingly drew an asteroid belt. The boy wiped his chalk-covered hands on his jeans, already coated with green smears.

“We did the work all on our own,” said the 10-year-old, beaming. “It makes you proud of it.”

Like the other students in Ramirez’s class, Mateo says he has gained a new appreciation for art. He carefully saves each drawing he does at school in a box under his bed, so his little brother won’t get them.

Classmate Karina Vargas, also 10, carts her latest pictures around in her backpack.

“I like putting things in my imagination on a piece of paper,” she said shyly.

She looked around the brightly colored classroom. “It’s brilliant in here, with all the drawings,” she said. “It makes me happy to be here.”

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‘If you want to get kids to really learn, you get them to do art.’