Trei Ramsey’s work features colorful, whimsical imagery that weaves in underlying themes that address serious and niche perspectives on our shared world. This approach is evident in the works at Touchstone, all from his Precocious Kid series.
Ramsey began the series in 2023 to explore how the environment affects overlooked communities. He addresses this concept through paintings, drawings, sketches, and multimedia. Inspiration may come from a book, the news, or a walk the artist takes. Ramsey reflects on why certain moments affect him and how they influence his mood. Once he identifies the environmental inspiration, such as light bulbs or a television, he considers how to represent it visually through sketches.
He starts with the face, following his guidelines for the character: a child with large eyes to signify innocence and influence, locs arranged in a Fibonacci spiral, and a head framed by a square to represent the child's constrained mental space, referencing the archaic slang term for an outsider, the “square.”
50 for 50 is an artist opportunity that invites 50 community artists to showcase their work at Touchstone throughout 2026, the year of Touchstone’s 50th anniversary.
Trei Ramsey is a self-taught multidisciplinary visual artist who works and lives in Washington D.C. He creates work that is described as powerful, colorful, and fun. Ramsey’s practice as an artist is inspired by his childhood obsession with Saturday morning cartoons, mythology, comic books, and western art history. Ramsey seeks to create a body of work that speaks to groups that are often ignored, by using the eclectic concepts he absorbed while growing up in America.
Ramsey’s artistic goal is to uplift, educate, and explore how we are similar to each other. He also wants to show how art and artmaking are accessible and vital for everyone. He has shared his visual art with the world since 2018, participating in many solo and group exhibitions at notable galleries across the DMV including Homme, Thundershark, Touchstone, Strathmore, and Washington Studio School. He earned his BFA in theater from Howard University.