Ruby Chishti

Ruby Chishti is a Pakistani-American artist known for her installation work with found materials. Interested in the ephemerality of memory, love, and loss, Chishti creates works that intersect universal human experience with culturally specific and biographical stories. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Biography Chishti was born in Jhang, Pakistan in 1963. She was the fourth daughter born to Safia Begum and Khushi Mohammed, whose first and sixth children were sons. Chishti felt the weight of gender discrimination within a patriarchal society from her birth which was met with distaste by family members who told Chishti they cried upon her birth at the disappointment of her not being a boy. The sentiment would later be explored in her work titled My birth will take place a thousand times no matter how you celebrate it.

Chishti's father died of cancer at 47, and her older brother at 27. In 1991, just three years after she graduated from NCA, Chishti put her career on hold to care for her mother. As a caretaker, she began to explore textiles, particularly discarded family garments and fabrics. During her early days in the U.S., Chishti worked in a corporate mail room sorting post for long hours and lifting heavy loads.

From 2012-2014, Chishti experienced health issues that delayed her practice. She continued to collect, layer, and sew together strips of fabric from discarded clothing, but it was not until she recovered that the artist was able to travel and pursue an artist residency in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Chishti now lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband. The pair made the decision to abstain from having children as a result of reflecting on Chishti's difficult childhood and lack of familial love.

Fabric usage Chishti's early works utilizes fabrics that tie to familial relationships and her various iterations of "home," while her later works reference a larger global issue of mass consumption and consumer waste within the fast fashion industry. Upon the loss of her father and older brother, Chishti found herself unable to discard the clothes that remained after their passing. Her approach to recycling fabrics was both a technique of imbuing personal memory into her sculptures but also a result of the scarcity mindset she grew up with. Raised in an environment with limited resources, Chishti was taught to care for items, repurpose them, and mend that which could still be functional. Thus, her utilization of fabric scraps was not initially an eco-critical commentary but rather a practice stemming from sentimentality and lived experience.

The behavior of crows aligns with the themes of loss and pain in the human experience that Chishti explores within her work. She was drawn to the crows' tendency to allow smaller birds to attack when they were exploited and for the whole flock to caw in a cacophony of mourning when just one bird was injured.

Dolls Chishti's work often features traditional handmade fabric dolls. Coming from a context in which women teach young girls to make such toys from residual cloth, Chishti's doll-making began as a form of youthful entertainment and now acts as a reference to the matrilineal teaching of women's labor and craft within a South Asian cultural heritage. Chishti was taught by her grandmother and returned to the practice as she became a caretaker for her ailing mother.