Ruby Sky Stiler (b. 1979) grew up between Maine and New Mexico and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her multi-dimensional practice draws from diverse time periods, artistic movements, and genres, imbuing familial and political structures with her own feminist values and insights. Nodding to art historical archetypes, Stiler’s work reimagines and recasts the history of figuration and the nude through intricate processes of disruption, fragmentation, and layering.
Drawing from her background as a printmaker, Stiler deftly navigates the tension between flatness and three-dimensionality, skillfully interweaving content with craft. Harnessing her decades-long engagement with diverse visual histories and techniques, Stiler reframes and updates the histories of collage and Cubism. Her work serves as a dynamic synthesis of past and present, melding Greco-Roman sculpture and Art Deco illustrations with contemporary textiles and internet-sourced imagery.
Her relief paintings simultaneously recall modernist block printed textiles and architectural details. These paintings combine resin, acrylic paint, graphite, and heavy watercolor paper into layered tiles that rupture and playfully subvert the art historical hegemony of the modernist grid. Central to this subversion, Stiler’s collaged figures challenge gendered art historical archetypes, depicting lesser-known tropes: a father with his children, lone matriarchs, and female artists, among others. She mines art history to combat the dichotomy between, in her own words, “woman as subject of painting versus creator of image.” Encompassing painting, sculpture, and design, Stiler’s work occupies an interdisciplinary space, challenging figure/ground and subject/creator hierarchies.
By rearticulating the past in her own distinctive vernacular, Stiler invites critical reflection on our present moment. Stiler explains, “It is very personal, but my reduction of forms also makes it more accessible, more like mirrors for people to project their own stories and histories into.” She adds, "What I strive for is to create a space where viewers can find connections and resonances that speak to our shared humanity."
Stiler’'s work is the subject of multiple solo presentations, including New Patterns, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY (2022); Group Relief, Fairfield University Art Museum, CT (2020); Fresco, Saint-Gaudens Memorial Park, Cornish, NH (2019); Ghost Versions, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2015); and Inherited and Borrowed Types, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, OR (2010), among others. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including Friends & Lovers, FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2023); No Forms, Hill Art Foundation, New York, NY (2022); Classic Beauty: 21st-Century Artists on Ancient [Greek] Form, Providence College Galleries, RI (2018); The Times, FLAG Art Foundation, NY (2017); We Are What We Hide, Institute of Contemporary Art, Maine College of Art & Design, Portland, ME (2013); and the Socrates Sculpture Park Emerging Artist Fellowship Exhibition, Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NY (2010), among others. Her work is in the collections of Fairfield University Art Museum, CT; The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, RI.
