Ramón Medina Silva

c. 1925–1971

Ramón Medina Silva (c. 1925–1971), whose Huichol name was Uru Temay (“Newly Made Arrow” or “Young Arrow Man”), was a Huichol (Wixárika) artist and shaman and the pioneer of the story-telling yarn painting. He was born in the Huichol sierra on the border between the communities of San Sebastián Teponahuaxtlan and Santa Catarina, and absorbed the traditions of both from his mother, Kuka, a shaman-singer from a family of shamans, and from other relatives. During the conflicts of the 1930s the family fled the emptied San Sebastián for the lower Río Lerma in Nayarit, where they farmed in poverty. At eighteen he met Guadalupe de la Cruz Ríos (“Lupe”), twelve years his senior and herself from a family of shamans, while both worked a coastal harvest. Their partnership lasted until his death.

By the early 1960s, impatient with the hardships of subsistence farming, the couple moved to the outskirts of Guadalajara. They cleared unused land, planted maize, beans, squash, and chile, and built a thatched ramada and a small windowless house. They sold yarn paintings and Lupe’s embroidery and weaving to Padre Ernesto Loera Ochoa, a Franciscan priest at the Basilica of Zapopan. Their rancho became a stopping place for Huichols traveling between the sierra and the city.

In 1965 the UCLA anthropologist Peter T. Furst, directed to Medina Silva by the cultural affairs officer of the American Consulate in Guadalajara, who owned one of his paintings, bought the two-foot-square yarn paintings he brought and began recording the myths he dictated in Huichol and Spanish. Medina Silva then called his paintings “puros adornos,” only decorations. When Furst asked whether he had thought of illustrating his historias with yarn, he had not, but he would try. In Furst’s words, “so was born the story-telling yarn painting, of which he was the pioneer and which has long since become the standard of Huichol art production.” His first series translated the epic of the antlered culture hero Kauyumari and the sorcerer Kieri, the personified Datura or “Tree of the Wind,” into four paintings. He went on to illustrate the origin of maize, the journey of the soul after death, the birth of the Sun and the theft of fire, the flood, and the sacred deer that is peyote. For him these were not myths but nuestra verdad, nuestra historia, “our truth, our history.” He insisted on symmetry, worked in yarn pressed into beeswax, and rarely charged more than fifteen dollars for an original two-foot painting.

A gifted singer and reciter of the sacred narratives, a player of the reed flute, violin, guitar, and musical bow, and a natural performer who acted out the myths he told, he embodied for Furst the shaman as the consummate artist of his society. Asked why one of his painted shamans was skeletonized, he answered that it was “so that you can recognize him as a shaman.”

In December 1966 he led the peyote pilgrimage to Wirikuta, the third of five he had pledged toward his completion as a shaman. Furst and the anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff took part, and it was the first such pilgrimage witnessed by anthropologists. It became the subject of Myerhoff’s dissertation and her book Peyote Hunt (1974). In 1967 he served as guide, translator, and consultant to the Mexican writer Fernando Benítez on a journey through the Huichol sierra. Furst reports that he became a mara’akame on completing his fifth pilgrimage in December 1968.

In the spring of 1971 he and Lupe traveled to California at the invitation of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, which had earlier mounted a major exhibition of the yarn paintings in UCLA’s collection, and he met UCLA Chancellor Franklin Murphy. He died later that year. Other artists have since achieved fame, and some may be better craftsmen, but Furst remembered him as the pioneer, and his paintings, particularly since his death, have inspired what Furst called “a veritable flood of copies.” After his death Guadalupe continued painting from his designs. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco hold four of his paintings, among them The Life Force of Peyote (ca. 1965–1971) and Tatewari, Our Grandfather Fire, along with works by Guadalupe de la Cruz Ríos after his designs. His early works were the focus of the Fowler Museum at UCLA’s 2016 exhibition The Spun Universe: Wixárika (Huichol) Yarn Paintings.

Sources: Berrin, Kathleen, ed. Art of the Huichol Indians. New York: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco / Harry N. Abrams, 1978. Biographical material from Peter T. Furst, "The Art of 'Being Huichol,'" 18–34 (dates, p. 18; family and skeletonization, 22–23; Kieri performance, 24–27; narrative innovation, commission, price, and death, 25–27; technique, 26–29; Guadalajara rancho, 30; influence and copies, 30). Pilgrimage of 1966: Barbara G. Myerhoff, "Peyote and the Mystic Vision," 56–70, note on p. 56. Works by Guadalupe after Ramón, 158–161.

Garfield Library, University of Pennsylvania. "Peter Furst, Anthropologist Extraordinaire." Accessed October 20, 2026. https://garfield.library.upenn.edu/papers/peterfurstintro110903.html. (Furst worked with Medina Silva 1965–1971; 1968 Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History exhibition.)

UCLA Newsroom. "Fowler Exhibition Features Yarn Paintings from Western Mexico." August 4, 2016. Accessed October 20, 2026. https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/fowler-exhibition-features-yarn-paintings-from-western-mexico. (Fowler 2016 exhibition; wife Guadalupe de la Cruz Ríos; Furst prompted narrative painting.)

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. "How One Person Received a Huichol Name," Ramón Medina Silva, 74.21.6. Via AMICO / David Rumsey Map Collection. Accessed October 20, 2026. http://www.davidrumsey.com/amica/amico871704-44056.html.

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Tatewari, Our Grandfather Fire. Ramón Medina Silva, 1965–1971. Yarn, adhesive, and board, 23 5/8 × 23 5/8 in. (60 × 60 cm). Gift of Mr. Peter F. Young, 74.21.12. Accessed October 20, 2026. https://www.famsf.org/artworks/tatewari-our-grandfather-fire.

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. "Art Finder: Ramón Medina Silva." Accessed October 20, 2026. https://www.famsf.org/art-finder?artist=111. (Four works by Medina Silva, including The Soul Is Punished by Angry Mules, The Life Force of Peyote [ca. 1965–1971], and Tatewari, Our Grandfather Fire [1965–1971, per the object record]; two by Guadalupe de la Cruz Ríos after his designs.)

Schaefer, Stacy B., and Peter T. Furst, eds. People of the Peyote: Huichol Indian History, Religion, and Survival. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. Peter T. Furst, introduction to chapter 6, "'How One Goes Being Huichol . . .': Ramón Medina Silva (ca. 1925–1971)," 169–184 (Huichol name, 169; birth, family, and move to Guadalajara, 171–177; 1965 meeting and the first story-telling painting, 177–181; 1966 pilgrimage and 1971 Los Angeles visit, 178–183; fifth pilgrimage, 184).

MacLean, Hope. The Shaman's Mirror: Visionary Art of the Huichol. Foreword by Peter T. Furst. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012. Ramón Medina and Lupe, 93–98 (Furst's catalogue quoted, 96–97); Lupe after 1971 and the Young purchases, 102; Eligio Carrillo, 114; signatures and texts, 143–145.

MacLean, Hope. "Huichol Yarn Paintings, Shamanic Art, and the Global Marketplace." Studies in Religion 32, no. 3 (2003): 311–335.

Furst, Peter T. "Myth in Art: A Huichol Depicts His Reality." Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History Quarterly 7, no. 3 (1968–69): 16–25. Cited from MacLean 2012; original not seen.

Sánchez Usón, María José. "Arte Wixárika nos museus do mundo" [Wixárika art in the world's museums]. Universidade Autónoma de Zacatecas. Periódicos UFSM. Accessed October 20, 2026. https://periodicos.ufsm.br/revislav/article/download/91338/67675?inline=1. (Confirms Medina Silva works in the FAMSF collection, The Life Force of Peyote, gift of Peter F. Young, not on view, and at the Fowler Museum, UCLA, from the Peter T. Furst collection. Gives no biography or market information.)