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Paul Ramírez Jonas (1965-) is a multimedia artist and educator in New York, New York.
Ramírez Jonas was born in Pomona, California and raised in Honduras. He earned a BA in Studio Art and an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1989. As a social practice artist Ramírez Jonas explores definitions of art and the public and seeks to engage active audience participation in much of his work. He uses pre-existing texts, models, and materials in work ranging from monumental sculpture to smaller and more intimate projects involving drawings, textiles, musical instruments, video and performance art, and other media.
Ramírez Jonas has had an ongoing association with Creative Time, a public arts organization in New York City which funded, amongst other projects, his 2010 project Key to the City, in which he replaced locks around the city with new locks that could be opened with keys he distributed. Keys have had an important role in Ramírez Jonas's work; his Taylor Square park project in Cambridge, for example, juxtaposes the locked gates of the public space with 5000 keys he distributed to the public to be duplicated endlessly, as a symbol of "this relationship between public space and the public."
Ramírez Jonas is an educator who has taught at institutions including the Rhode Island School of Design and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He is currently an Associate Professor at Hunter College, City University of New York.