Ramos’s use of “Navajo” to title this piece capitalizes on racist tropes historically used against Indigenous women . The use of the patterned fabric as the sole indication of indigeneity is an appropriation of indigenous art styles, and allows Ramos to weaponize cultural traditions to fulfill his own fantasies. This is particularly problematic given the history of Native American genocide in the United States, whereby colonizers utilized rape as a means of unspeakable violence upon Indigenous women to coerce, control, and ultimately change the racial and genetic make up of their offspring.

This print is a rendition of Édouard Manet’s scandalous painting Olympia (1863), which upended the tradition of the classical female nude by refusing mythological alibis and instead depicting a woman immediately recognizable as a prostitute. Ramos re-sexualizes Manet’s subversive image and objectifies his model, who is styled to look like a California pin-up girl and echoes pornographic magazines of the time. The Black figure, who as in Manet is posed as a maid behind the bed on which Olympia reclines, reinforces the sexualization of the white body, as she gazes coyly at the viewer. The monkey at the foot of the bed, a strange pet, highlights the stereotypical exoticism of the work.