Visiting Artist: Ruby Neri

Ruby Neri (b. 1970, San Francisco) draws upon 20th-century West Coast traditions and a global catalogue of art historical and anthropological modes. She depicts the human body as a porous instrument of pleasure, terror, and everything in between, placing her in a lineage of Los Angeles-based artists like Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy. Her focus on hand-driven craft connects her to the Bay Area Figurative and Funk movements. Over the last 20 years, Neri has been a leading figure in the revival of ceramics as a contemporary art medium. Her vessels evoke earthy tactility and psychological intimacy, while her use of sprayed glazes links her ceramics to the street art she produced in the late 1990s as a member of the San Francisco-based Mission School, blending contemporary urban art with the archaic power of pre-historical wall-painting and object-making.

In 2018, Ruby Neri was featured in a two-person exhibition, Alicia McCarthy and Ruby Neri / MATRIX 270, at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), California. Recent group shows include Funk You Too!, Museum of Arts and Design (2023), New York; The Flames: The Age of Ceramics, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (2021–2022); New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century, BAMPFA, California (2021); The Domestic Plane: New Perspectives on Tabletop Art Objects, Objects Like Us, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2018); From Funk to Punk, Left Coast Ceramics, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York (2017); Fertile Ground: Art and Community in California, Oakland Museum of California and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2014); Energy That is All Around: Mission School, Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York (2014); Busted, High Line, New York (2013); and Made in L.A. 2012, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012). Her work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Brooklyn Museum, New York; de Young Museum, San Francisco; and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Neri lives and works in Los Angeles.