CV

Bio [2026]

Ruby T [b. 1986] is an artist, educator, and organizer. Rooted in drawing, her practice has offshoots in painting, print, fibers, comics, performance, and video. Recent solo exhibitions include Sheet Cake Gallery in Memphis, TN, Farm Projects in Wellfleet, MA, and Western Exhibitions in Chicago, IL. She has also exhibited and performed at Hales Gallery in New York, NY; Bass & Reiner in San Francisco, CA; and Roots & Culture and Iceberg Projects in Chicago, IL. Her comics and illustrations have been published by Half Letter Press, and are in the collection of the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ruby received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016. She lives and works on Shawnee, Cherokee, Chickasaw and Osage land, also known as Louisville, KY.

Statement [2026]

My work is concerned with the power and limits of both fantasy and empathy within an oppressive social order. I work in years-long spirals of inquiry, digestion, and iteration.

I am currently engaged with two intertwined actions: 1. using ritual, beaded embroidery, painting, and research to attempt a radical reclamation of the sublime within the contexts of ecological catastrophe and the fraught genre of landscape painting; and 2. obsessively listening to interviews with rightwing political figures on repeat while making drawings and paintings about contemporary political spectatorship and subjecthood within rising state repression and Christian nationalism.

Recent primary source materials include Mourt’s Relation, a 1622 account of the Pilgrims’ arrival on Cape Cod, and CBS News Presents: A Town Hall with Erika Kirk, a 2025 televised spectacle hosted by Bari Weiss.

My intention is to cultivate devotion to liberation (my highest value), make myself laugh, and exercise my overactive political imagination so that I may be available for grassroots organizing endeavors along with other obligations for survival.