COURTESY
CORNISH — The Trustees of the Saint-Gaudens Memorial are pleased to present the work of Ruby Sky Stiler in her exhibition Fresco, showing from May 25 to July 7 in the Picture Gallery at the Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park.
Stiler is the 2018 recipient of the Saint-Gaudens Fellowship, an annual award that recognizes contemporary artists who demonstrate exceptional promise. Augustus Saint-Gaudens believed in promoting emerging American artists, and this fellowship continues that vision.
In her work, Stiler refers to various movements throughout the history of art. She is interested in the relief sculptures and fresco techniques of the Greco-Roman period. She also explores the idea of the female nude, which has appeared in varied forms in twentieth-century abstraction, and in artists’ sketchbooks and drawings. In Fresco, Stiler’s frames allude to the intricate carved wooden frames that Saint-Gaudens used in his own relief sculptures. Stiler has said of the paintings made for this exhibition:
The figures and patterns that reside in the fresco are rendered in graphite, referencing a sketchbook, where drawings and studies appear as unburdened explorations. Influences range from the art historical to the deeply personal — from Greco-Roman textbook plates, art deco illustrations, and Fauvism to my own imagination. As I make, and remake, the compositions, they shift and become further removed from their original source and intention, claiming a space in the continual present.
Ruby Sky Stiler has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; Locust Projects, Miami, Florida; The Suburban, Oak Park, Illinois; and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Oregon. She was included in significant group exhibitions at Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, New York; the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College, Collegeville, Pennsylvania; and the Wellin Museum of Art, Clinton, New York, among many other venues. She received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from the Yale School of Art. Stiler lives and works in Brooklyn.
There will be a reception on Saturday, June 22, 4-6 p.m., with an artist’s talk at 4:30 p.m. The Picture Gallery is located at the Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park, 139 Saint-Gaudens Road, Cornish, New Hampshire.
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