Restorative

Cultural

Arts™

Restorative Cultural Arts™ (RCA) is a praxis conceptualized by Omar G Ramirez. The praxis is grounded in community. Its focus is to make visible the experiences, knowledge, and wisdom inherited, shaped and created by Communities of Color in the US. It centers the artistic process and storytelling practices focusing on cultural aesthetics, traditional cultural arts, ancestral knowledge, and experiential knowledge. 

The intention is to facilitate and encourage dynamic collaboration, active participation, and critical engagement to investigate historical, intergenerational, and childhood experiences. Restorative Cultural Arts focus is on process, the participants, and the environment. 

RCA projects are cooperative in their procedures. Each project has three elements to consider: site, situation, and participants. All three determine the parameters of the project. These parameters hold space for collaboration, participation, and engagement. The site incorporates the participants’ surroundings. The situation examines the who, what, when, where, why, and how of the project to determine “what matters most?” The role of the participant is to engage, collaborate, and participate in critical, authentic, and meaningful ways. Though there are no predetermined time constraints, the process is intended to evolve over time. This built-in spontaneity invites participants to critically think about their historical, intergenerational, and childhood experiences.  

Restorative Cultural Arts is an intergenerational practice designed to facilitate a process for community actualization through restoration and transformation practices to strengthen the wisdom of ancestral and living cultures in perpetuity.

RESTORATIVE CULTURAL ARTS ™ PRESENTATION
Omar G. Ramirez,
Restorative Cultural Arts Praxis Conceptualist and Practitioner

Omar G. Ramirez is a Chicano Artist working for over 20 years in community spaces, educational institutions, and with incarcerated populations. His work is rooted in his family and cultural experiences. He was born and raised in the El Sereno community of Los Angeles.. His father’s family migrated to Los Angeles over a Century ago settling east of the LA river. His mother’s family have roots in Mexico. She immigrated to Los Angeles in the late 1960’s and was a master seamstress as well as a homemaker to Omar and his 3 siblings. Restorative Cultural Arts Practice provides opportunity for collaboration, participation, and engagement. In the 1990's, Omar began exploring immigration, race, class, and gender dynamics through digital art, video, performance, and public art installations while studying at the University of California at Irvine. He was one of the principal collaborating artists to work with the Zapatistas during the Encuentro Chicano Indigena workshops and discussions in Chiapas. These collaborations became the foundation for his work in New York City, leading him to develop multiple projects with various communities over the span of five years. In 2001, Omar collaborated with educators, youth, and activists to establish the East Palo Mural Art Project. 


In 2005, he became an executive member of the Board of Directors for Self Help Graphics & Art (SHG) helping stabilize operations at the historic East Los Angeles cultural arts community center. In 2010, he began working with the Mexican American Legal Defense And Educational Fund generating cultural arts and civic youth driven projects. Soon after, he started to design restorative and transformative cultural arts curriculum for Alliance for California Traditional Arts and Boyle Heights Arts Conservatory. He lectures at the Chicanx and Latinx Studies Department in the School of Ethnic Studies at the California State University of Los Angeles and at the Intercollegiate Department of Chicanx Latinx Studies at SCRIPPS and Pomona College.