Manola and Maria Ramirez are sisters from San Antonio who work as one studio with two very different hands. Manola, by her own account, is the controlled one. Maria is the free-flowing one. Put them on the same surface and you get work that is bold, graphic and very hard to walk past, built from color, pattern and the Mexican American culture they grew up inside.
Sisters in the arts.
Both studied studio art at the University of Texas at Austin, a semester apart, and found screen printing in a class there. They have made work together since 2018. From Lavaca Studios, an all-women collaborative space south of downtown, they print for other artists, teach screen printing and make their own work in painting, printmaking, illustration, murals and public art. Their public work runs across the city, more than twenty murals and public works, from the play-and-recreation murals at the Ramirez Community Center, made with Adriana Garcia, to Día de los Muertos passages and altars at the Pearl.
Manola was born in San Antonio and lived in Guanajuato, Mexico, until she was six. She meant to be a filmmaker until a drawing class changed the plan. Her Faldas series turns the swirling skirts of ballet folklórico into paintings, and into a swarm of laser-cut paper skirts pinned in flight. Together the sisters made Había Una Vez, a 2026 exhibition at Centro Cultural Aztlan that tells the immigrant story through color, folk symbolism and bicultural imagery, a journey through memory, migration and belonging.
At Hopscotch San Antonio they take the featured gallery from November 4, 2026. A hometown show, from two artists who have spent years putting their work where the whole city can see it.
