A few minutes after I turned off my recorder when I visited Ruby Neri’s Los Angeles studio last week on the eve of her opening for Staircase at David Kordansky, she reminds herself as much as she reminded me that her work is about all the emotions, responsibilities, expectations, pressure, joys and politics of being a woman in this modern world. This is important in the context of what Ruby has been doing in her career over the course of 30 plus years: as a young art student in San Francisco, she found a voice with graffiti that stood in contrast with her studies at SFAI, althought both excited her. She found a bond with the other artists that would go on to become known as the Mission School. She found the direction of sculpture and ceramics when she moved to Los Angeles, influenced by her father Manuel Neri but also carving her own path.
Staircase comes at a time that Neri is preparing her first full museum survey opening in January 2025, which happens to be at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art on the campus of UC Davis, a university where her father taught from1965 to 1990. In a way, Neri was speaking of Staircase as the end of something and the beginning of a new era, but she couldn’t quite pinpoint if that was just an internal feeling or something that will show in her the works. She is taking on a lot at the moment, but as she reminds me, she is a maker. She makes all day. Clay happens to be where she finds a daily love, a meditation of sorts, but she is also working on paintings now and her works on paper at Kordanksy are brilliant as they are loose and lively.
Neri spoke lovingly of her time as a student in San Francisco, her love of her father’s work and the simple joy she still gets from making the work she makes. That energy of graffiti she feels in working with clay. In Stairase, it may be the beginning of an end, a transformation, and the work is vital as ever. —Evan Pricco
