Join us on VOLTA Visits, a recurring series where we spend studio time with VOLTA exhibiting artists and learn more about their background, process, and projects.

For this edition, VOLTA visits Ruth Owens in her studio in New Orleans. VOLTA invited Jasmin Hernandez (she/her), the Black Latinx founder & eic of her art baby Gallery Gurls. An award-winning digital space celebrating Black & POC in contemporary art since 2012.

In early April, during a Zoom studio visit with New Orleans-based artist Ruth Owens (she/her), Owens is fresh-faced while speaking to me from her sunny studio, and proudly shares that her autobiographical paintings and video works, stem from “preserving and contributing to the Black archive.”

Owens, born in Germany to a Black American father in the military and a white German mother, weaves her biracial identity and personal family history across her figurative oil paintings, acrylic works on paper, and video art.

Growing up between Europe and the U.S. in the ‘60s and ‘70s, she describes Germany as “cold, sterile, gray, and uninviting”, and Georgia, her father’s home state, as “warm and inviting.” But she feels, “most at home here in the American South”, because of its “great connection to African American culture”, and being much “closer to African rituals.”

“Ruth Owens lays bare her realities about her mixed-race identity, the family dynamics that shaped her, her Black Americanness, her German roots, and her nomadic early years.”

Owens’ canvases and video art are sourced from stills from her family’s Super 8 camera archival footage from the ‘60s and ‘70s. Memories, nostalgia, varying gorgeous landscapes from her eclectic childhood in Georgia and Germany, and her Black womanhood, narrate the tapestry of her life, seen and felt in her intimate and soothing pastel-hued paintings, and deeply revelatory video art.

Ruth Owens, a former cosmetic surgeon in NOLA for twenty-five years, credits her medical career for molding her to be “very attentive to visuals” and “very disciplined in my life” in her studio practice.

The rising artist earned an MFA from the University of New Orleans in 2018, is a member of the artist collectives A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn and “The Front” in New Orleans, and select solo exhibits include two exhibitions at the Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, with a third solo show slated for next year. A few past residencies include the Vermont Studio Center, The Joan Mitchell Center, and upcoming residencies at MASS MoCA this July and ISCP for several months in 2023.

Ruth Owens lays bare her realities about her mixed-race identity, the family dynamics that shaped her, her Black Americanness, her German roots, and her nomadic early years. Her multiple histories all collide in the most stunning and complex of ways, across her expressive oil paintings and touching video works.

Revealing the complexity, nuances, and psychology of individual people of color.

“I’m a figurative painter and video artist whose work expands the narrative around feminine and racial identity. Putting forth the concept that identity is fluid and open, my subjects cross boundaries that hold in fixed and static constructs. Revealing the complexity, nuances, and psychology of individual people of color, I resist essential or stereotypical limits. I use myself and the intimacy of my family as models to assert the individualities, challenges, and unique perspectives of lives that are atypical by virtue of the standards and narrow vision prevalent in the world. 

Much of the imagery in my paintings and videos is culled from footage found in my family’s super-8 film archive from the 1960’s and 1970’s, therefore imparting an intimate, gestural, and cinematic impression. The influence of this archive also makes my work a psychological exploration of personal memory with regards to family dynamics and relationships.”

Ruth Owens is presented by JONATHAN FERRARA GALLERY in New Orleans. The gallery introduces her as part of a dual artist exhibition of female painters in a dialogue with Lisa Sanditz. The conversation between these two artists’ works begins with their focus on the natural environment, and more specifically human involvement therein.

RUTH OWENS
Born 1959 in Germany
Lives and works in New Orleans

Education

2018 Master of Fine Arts University of New Orleans, LA
1968 Doctorate of Medicine, Northwestern Medical School, Chicago, IL

Recent Solo Exhibitions (selection)

2021 Be Kind to Yourself, Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, New Orleans
2020 Black Outdoors, Southeastern Louisiana University Contemporary Art Gallery, Hammond, LA
2019 Good Family, The Front Gallery, Brooklyn
2018 Identity Theft, Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, New Orleans
2018 Baby Love, University of New Orleans Gallery
2017 Conspiracies, Barrister’s Gallery, New Orleans
2016 Steppin’ Out, Xavier University Chapel Gallery, New Orleans

VOLTA Visit special collaboration with Gallery Gurls Founder Jasmin Hernandez

Jasmin Hernandez (she/her) is the Black Latinx founder & eic of her art baby Gallery Gurls. An award-winning digital space celebrating Black & POC in contemporary art since 2012.

Gallery Gurls has been featured in Vogue, Artnet, and Artsy. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, Latina, Bustle, ELLE, CNN Style, Sotheby’s, etc. Her debut book, We Are Here: Visionaries of Color Transforming the Art World, was released by Abrams (2021).

Her writing has been awarded + funded by The Awesome Foundation (2018) & Critical Minded (2020), and she was a 2021 finalist for The Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant for Short-Form Writing. She is a proud Dominican Yorker, based in Harlem. You’ll find this Parsons alumna gallery hopping locally and globally, usually sipping on an oat milk cafe au lait, and constantly reading Black womxn authors.