After reading about AFAM’s exhibition in a newspaper, Peggy Dunievitz contacted the museum to inform its curator, Brooke Davis Anderson, that she believed she had some original Ramírez works to show her.

Dunievitz’s son, Phil, had rescued the works from the trash after Dr. Dunievitz died in 1988. He rolled up the artworks and placed them in long florist-shop boxes and stored them in his mother’s garage. Years later, he transferred the drawings to a cardboard box that lay on top of a refrigerator in that garage, topped off by a sleeping bag and, sometimes, a lounging cat.

A self-described packrat, the younger Dunievitz says he thought the drawings "might have looked cool as wallpaper in a restaurant."

On one occasion, he even wrapped a gift in one of the works. On the strength of e-mailed photos of some of the drawings Anderson had requested from Peggy Dunievitz, the curator raced to California to examine the cache in person. "I was in awe," she recalls. "Many had been dated and signed by Dr. Dunievitz, on Ramírez’s behalf, with the artist’s name." Anderson points out that a few of the newly found works are more than 18 feet long, that many are in good condition and that some feature collage elements or a slightly "different stylization" of Ramírez’s familiar subjects.

AFAM will present an exhibition of the "new" Ramírezes late this year and publish an accompanying book filled with reproductions.

The Dunievitzes intend to donate three of the drawings to the museum and after the show, to bring the rest of the works to market through Ricco/Maresca, a well-known New York gallery in the outsider field. Reportedly, they also plan to use some of their future earnings from sales to honor Ramírez’s descendants, who own none of his works and have never profited from his posthumous success.

Dealer Frank Maresca of Ricco/Maresca notes that the sales plan he is formulating will aim to place many of the works in museums "so that the widest audience possible may have access to this phase of Ramírez’s extraordinary art."

None of the newly revealed Ramírez drawings will be offered for sale until they have all been treated by art conservators and photographed for posterity with state-of-the art digital equipment, according to Maresca.

With the Dunievitz discovery, is the tally of Ramírez’s artistic production complete? Anderson is not so sure. She muses, "I’m convinced that other DeWitt doctors and nurses may have taken some of his drawings home with them. They could still be out there."