Ruby Neri

Ruby Rose Neri (born 1970) is an American visual artist, known for her work as a sculptor and painter. She was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, drawing creative influence from her parents and their friends. Neri is both a painter and a sculptor, and has worked with a wide array of materials including clay, plaster, bronze, steel, fiberglass, glaze, acrylic, oil, and spray paint. 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.

The style that her father developed as a sculptor during the second generation of Bay Area Figuration also influenced Neri's work, which emerged later in her life as she made the switch from painting to sculpture.

While there, she became close friends with artists Alicia McCarthy, Barry McGee, and Margaret Kilgallen. 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”.

Current work Having exhibited since the mid-1990s, Neri maintains a stimulating artistic practice through a commitment to experimentation. 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. She also states that, “Although I was primarily a painter for many years, ceramics has been a major influence on how I approach materials and how I physically manipulate objects”.