Ruby Neri

Neri's most recent accomplishment is her inclusion in the book, “Vitamin C: Clay and Ceramic in Contemporary Art”, published in 2017. The book is a global survey of one hundred of today's leading clay and ceramic artists - Neri is included alongside notable artists such as Anders Ruhwald, Edmund de Waal, Theaster Gates, Ron Nagle, Grayson Perry, and Betty Woodman.

While there, she became close friends with artists Alicia McCarthy, Barry McGee, and Margaret Kilgallen. She and her friends would later become associated with the movement known as “The Mission School”, canonized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2010, when the institution deemed the Mission School, “...the most significant art movement to emerge out of San Francisco in the late twentieth century”. In the book “Energy That is All Around”, Curator Hesse McGraw credits this group of deeply connected artists with changing the “language” of SFAI as an institution, stating that, “They have come to reflect the highest achievement of an art school, which is to cultivate artists whose work adds new strains to contemporary art, and perhaps more importantly, who care about each other enough to add life to a community of artists”.

In 1994, Ruby moved from the Bay Area to Los Angeles, and would go on to earn her Master's of Fine Art from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1998. There, she made the gradual transition from producing mostly painting to sculpture. Her first foray into sculpture was through plaster, which she used to create abstracted figures of humans and horses in a style reminiscent of cubist painting. This transition was perhaps sparked by the fact that she was, for the first time, free of the impositions of her father's legacy. Her frustration with the weight of painting's history encouraged this transition into sculpture to continue. As Neri states in an interview for the Los Angeles Review of Books, “Painting is so demanding in terms of its history. The whole idea of what painting is became problematic for me and I didn’t have the time to address all the issues that were not interesting to me at all...”.

In 1992, Ruby moved from Nicasio, California to San Francisco, CA to study painting at the San Francisco Art Institute. Ruby's father, Manuel was teaching at SFAI while Ruby was a student, making his presence and influence in her education almost unavoidable. Ruby stated in an interview that, “During undergrad at SFAI all my teachers were either my father’s students or his contemporaries; I felt very limited by this but was unaware of it at the time”. Despite this limitation, her experience at SFAI proved to be one of the most influential times in her life and career.

Born to a family of artists, Neri was exposed to ways of making and expressing from a very young age. Her mother's ability to render realistic images of human figures and horses proved to have a heavy influence in Neri's early work as a painter and a graffiti artist in the 1990s, and as subjects still remain in her work today.

Members of The Mission School were working within a special combination of time and place, growing up in and around art school during the early to mid-1990s during the pre-internet age, when San Francisco still possessed its “legendary bohemian-inflected vibe”. They were gearing up to start their art careers at the “very cusp of the digital age”, and with San Francisco's proximity to Silicon Valley they would go on to, “experience a culture-shattering dot-com technology boom/bust in the mid to late ‘90s”, which brought with it a rampant case of gentrification.

Having exhibited since the mid-1990s, Neri maintains a stimulating artistic practice through a commitment to experimentation. Throughout her career, she has explored the possibilities in paint (oil, acrylic, spray), plaster, and clay - her current work is a visual culmination of those explorations. Neri deftly combines elements of figuration, abstraction, graffiti, and folk art through clay, plaster, and paint to create complex, expressive and kinetic sculptures.