“I decided right there and then to be a Chicanx artist.” Los Angeles painter and triple Golden Bear Ramon Ramirez (BA Architecture 93 & MArch ’97; MA ’97, Design) is known for transforming palm-lined horizons, shifting light, and urban geometry into large-scale portraits of the city where he was born and raised. Architecture brought him to Berkeley, but an art history assignment to see a major exhibition of Chicanx artists at SFMOMA illuminated a new direction. Back on campus, Professor Emeritus of Architecture Anthony Dubovsky shaped how he saw and drew the world. “He changed my life forever,” Ramirez says. His architectural training grounds his compositions, while his art studies deepen their emotional clarity — resulting in work that feels both engineered and felt. Calling Los Angeles his “primary muse,” his work reflects its restlessness: saturated skies, solitary palms, graffiti walls, and neighborhoods distilled into color and silhouette. Scale matters to him: “My brain tells...