Ginny Ruffner

Ginny Carol Ruffner (née Martin; June 21, 1952 – January 20, 2025) was an American glass artist based in Seattle, Washington.

Many of her ideas begin with drawings. Her works also include pop-up books, large-scale public art, and augmented reality. She received The Glass Art Society's Lifetime Award in 2019.

Early life Ruffner was born on June 21, 1952, in Atlanta, Georgia.

Career Ruffner studied at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, and Winthrop College in Rock Hill, South Carolina, before transferring to the University of Georgia. There she received a BFA in Drawing and Painting in 1974 and an MFA in Drawing and Painting in 1975. In a twentieth century art history course, Ruffner saw The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), a glass painting by Marcel Duchamp. It inspired her to begin painting on glass.

Following graduation, one of Ruffner's first jobs was working for Hans Godo Frabel as an apprentice lamp worker, There she introduced the use of borosilicate glass. Through Ruffner's work, lampworking was first recognized as a medium for fine art.

Ruffner's series "Aesthetic Engineering: The Imagination Cycle" of sculptures was inspired by genetic engineering and the sharing of plant and animal genes. The exhibition has travelled extensively.

One of her public art projects, "Urban Garden" (2011), is a 27-foot high metal flowerpot, with flowers and moving petals, in downtown Seattle. The sculpture is also a kinetic water feature.

In Reforestation of the Imagination (2018) she combined sculpture in glass and bronze with augmented reality, so that digital images of imagined creatures could be overlaid on sculptural works.

Works

Through the use of lampworking she has developed a distinctive style, creating glass sculptures, mixed media installations and works of public art that are known for being "opulent, figurative, richly colored and metaphorical". followed by solo and group exhibitions at museums such as the Corning Museum of Glass; Museum of Arts and Design; Museum of Glass; Museum of Northwest Art; and Seattle's Traver Gallery, among others.

Her work is in the permanent collections of the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass, Detroit Institute of Art, Fort Wayne Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Mexico Museum of Art; Seattle Art Museum, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art.

She was the subject of a documentary, Ginny Ruffer: A Not So Still Life (2010), which won the Golden Space Needle Award - Best Documentary at the Seattle International Film Festival that year.

Personal life and death In 1975, she married Charles Emory Nail, divorced in 1980, and married Robert Edward Ruffner later that year.

In 1991, Ruffner was involved in a life-threatening three-car collision. She was in a coma for five weeks. When she finally recovered consciousness, she could not speak, walk, or remember that she was an artist. Doctors doubted that she would walk or talk again. But after a year of extensive physical, speech, and vision therapy, Ruffner was able to return to work. She credits her recovery to being "stubborn and bullheaded". She rediscovered her own work, in part through the book Why Not?: The Art of Ginny Ruffner (1995) and then revisioned it, juxtaposing materials in ways that balanced "beauty with danger".