Los Angeles artist Ruby Neri carries West Coast street art into her ceramic practice through the interplay of bright glazes and bold, hand-crafted shapes. At the invitation of retiring professor and long-time ceramics area chair Ted Saupe, Neri will be visiting the Lamar Dodd School of Art on the week of October 17 for a series of engagements with students, faculty, and the general public through the school's Visiting Artist and Scholar program. 

The second visiting artist of the 2022-2023 academic year (after Athenaeum exhibiting artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed), Neri will present a lecture on her work on Tuesday, October 18 at 5:30 PM at the Lamar Dodd School of Art on 270 River Road in room S151. The event is free and the public is invited to attend.

In addition to her lecture, Neri will run a day-long demo with students (including members of the Ceramic Student Organization) and conduct studio visits with MFA graduate students specializing in drawing and painting.

Read about her current solo exhibition Wall Works at the David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles and learn more about her practice in a 2019 feature in The New York Times Style Magazine.

Ruby Neri, Necessary Dependents, 2022. Cast bronze, 99 x 76 x 49. Edition of 3, with 1 AP. On view in Wall Works at David Kordansky Gallery.

Artist bio

Ruby Neri (b. 1970, San Francisco) draws upon twentieth-century West Coast traditions as well as 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; this places her within a lineage of recent Los Angeles-based artists that includes Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, while her penchant for hand-driven craft connects her to the Bay Area Figurative and Funk movements. The ceramic vessels that have dominated Neri’s production recently evoke both earthy tactility and psychological intimacy. Neri’s use of sprayed glazes links her ceramics to the street art she produced in the late 1990s as a member of what would become the San Francisco-based Mission School, connecting a contemporary urban art form with the archaic power of pre-historical wall-painting and object-making.

Ruby Neri is presenting a solo exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, from September 2022 through October 2022. In 2018, Neri was the subject of 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 The Flames: The Art of Ceramics, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (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; BAMPFA, California; Brooklyn Museum, New York; and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Neri lives and works in Los Angeles.

Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture Series

The Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture series has brought over 80 distinguished guests to the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia since 2002. Visiting Artists and Scholars spend three days on campus interacting with students and faculty, the culmination of which is a public lecture on the subject of the artist’s or scholar’s work.