After more than two decades representing his own work, the visual artist takes his company public
Ricardo Osmondo Francis has bet on himself since 2000. He came up skeptical of galleries and the art market, so he built his own lane and represented his own work. This week, that quiet operation goes public.
Apanamae Productions launches a new website Friday at 7 a.m. — Juneteenth — and the date is intentional. For the first time, he’ll sell original paintings next to merchandise: totes, art cards and T-shirts drawn from his catalog. He fought the idea for years.
“I believed that I was supposed to sell my work — original work, that is,” Francis said.
The shift came after years of people telling him his images belonged on more than gallery walls. The logic is simple. Merchandise opens a door for people who love the work but aren’t art collectors, and every shirt or tote points back to the originals.
Francis was born in Houston in 1976 and earned his bachelor of fine arts in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1998. His paintings pull from classical portraiture, antiquity and the visual noise of modern advertising, circling the same questions: race, culture, memory, gender, and the point where the personal turns political. He keeps a studio at Project for Empty Space on Broad Street in downtown Newark, where he has worked for more than a decade.
He built community-based multimedia projects through the 1990s, mounted solo shows including “Exhibit A” (2002) and “New sKIN” (2003), and earned a Presidential Scholarship in the Arts as a high school senior. His exhibition “2020” premiered in Houston, his hometown, then traveled north to Newark.
The work holds up under a critic’s eye. In 2024, his painting “Go Tell It on the Mountain/James and William” — a portrait of writer James Baldwin set against a marble bust of Shakespeare — landed in the “Afrofuturism” group show at the Paper Mill Playhouse. NJ Arts critic Tris McCall singled it out as the antidote to a room crowded with symbols, “a dance with a real human being.” Last year, his solo exhibition “The GOLDEN State” debuted at 7 Space Art Gallery in Newark.
Francis builds everything around people. “Apanamae Productions ultimately is telling human stories,” he said. “It just happens to be, most times, through a Black and brown lens.”
He reads Newark the same way he reads his field. “Newark is oftentimes overlooked,” he said, “the same way it is in terms of Black visual art representation in the art world in general.” Planting Apanamae in the heart of downtown answers both.
The road here ran through loss. For 15 years, Francis served as gallery director of Leonides Arts in New York under his mentor, Leonides Molinar, a man he describes as both a father and a teacher. Molinar died in 2021. One lesson stuck. “If I would say Leo did teach me something, it was not to worry,” Francis said.
That patience shapes how he talks about the work and what he wants it to do. “That is what great art does,” he said. “It stops people in their tracks.”
The relaunch is deliberately small — a website, a tight line of merchandise, an email list, the first scaffolding of the company Francis is now formalizing. The ambition underneath runs deeper. He has spent more than two decades proving the work. Now he’s building the structure to carry it past Newark.
The site goes live Juneteenth. Buy a piece. Watch what a veteran does once he decides to scale.
Visit www.apanamae.com to support.