Ruby Neri

At the time of this interview with Ruby Neri, it was November 2024. Her solo show at David Kordansky in Los Angeles had just opened, a solo show was set to open at Massimodecarlo in London in January 2025, and her first solo institutional show, Deep Dive at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, was in the final stages of preparation. For Neri, who was quite relaxed in her Frogtown studio during my afternoon visit, it was the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. A career milestone with a sense of something fresh on the horizon—a chapter's end, rather than the end of the novel.

 

Then, the fires. Neri lost her home in Altadena, and this conversation felt both futile and almost prophetic. Discussions about the rush to fill three galleries with her work, chapters ending, and contemplating the legacy of her late father, Manuel Neri, along with the unique identity of being a Californian artist, weighed particularly heavy in this hindsight. Her enthusiastic reflections on the Mission School and her friends and time in San Francisco suggested she was simultaneously looking back while moving forward. She spoke of cycles in an artist’s life, finding herself in the midst of a new creative phase. Perhaps this conversation holds different insights now—I do not know—but the meaning feels heightened after such dramatic changes in her life. Her exhibitions in London and at the Manetti Shrem Museum are now significant markers in her career timeline.

 

In this conversation, we discuss the legacy of UC Davis, the approach to her museum show, and how clay, graffiti, and now painting have entered her life at precisely the right moments. Her reverence for her past is palpable, her admiration for her father’s career is profound, and there is a genuine curiosity in her voice as she begins to envision her own future.

Ruby Neri: Okay, good.

 

It’s kind of this weird clusterfuck of stuff going on. It all sort of happened at the same time, which is amazing. I'm super grateful it was like this; it could have been spread out more, maybe, but this is good too.

 

The Manetti Shrem Museum exhibition is amazing because I've never had a solo institutional show before. I've barely had any institutional experience, period, so I'm very grateful for this opportunity. It feels fantastic to be doing it. It's crazy to have gallery shows like this, with Kordansky in LA and Massimodecarlo in London, but working in a public institutional space is a completely different animal. It's already giving me a lot of positive energy for creating new things and what comes next.

 

Yeah, almost like a new chapter in my life. Maybe this show at the Manetti Shrem Museum signifies the end of something and the beginning of something new as well.

 

As an artist, you have that backlog of work, things no one has ever seen. It’s super fun to think of unveiling and showcasing aspects of your work that haven’t been widely viewed. It’s an opportunity to tie up loose ends and complete the circle, which excites me.

 

I do get sentimental. My dad taught at UC Davis, so the university has been a part of my family. It feels like coming home for me in a sense. I love the space and the campus.

 

I have strong feelings because my dad was so influential in my life, in how and why I became an artist. I love his work deeply, so this means a lot to me on many levels. I'm definitely feeling sentimental about it, but I'm also hoping it helps me see my work in a different context.

 

It's funny because I've never wanted to live outside of California. I'm from the Bay Area, and I came to Los Angeles and that was kind of as far as I needed to go.

 

I feel like California is always this sort of sleepy sort of dreamer place. But it has definitely gone through immense changes in terms of art. It's a total destination now, and it has its own sort of life as an artist. When I moved to LA in 1996, it was like a village, nothing was happening here. Even with all the artists that were here taught at the institutions around town, it was just super sleepy. The students worked for those artists. I worked for Charles Ray, I worked for Mike Kelley. But there weren’t a lot of people coming here to be artists. But space was super cheap, and I feel like people could explore a lot of stuff with their work, especially sculpture. There's a lot of people doing sculpture here.

 

But I mean, in terms of being a California artist, I feel like I have a different perspective maybe because my dad was so prominent in California movements. It's just so strongly in my roots and in my DNA, in terms of the people I grew up with and what my parents were doing. All of my creative sources and blood comes from the Bay Area, so to speak, and basically California. But I mean, in the bigger picture, I don't know. Who knows? 

 

Wait, what movement are you talking about?

 

Oh, the Mission School (laughs). 

From my experience, I left the Bay Area four years before that term was even brought into existence. But, absolutely, it was super fun during that time and making work there and then. It was the best time in my life being at SFAI. It was so much fun; it was just so wild and so emotional, and it was just like, you're just so pumped. You're in your early twenties, making art, with your friends. It was a blast. I cannot deny it. 

 

San Francisco was still kind of weird and cool in its own way; rich and diverse in terms of making and all the different communities overlapping. There was poetry, the queer scene, art on the streets, bike messengers, critical mass… and it was just so much fun. Everything was so much fun. Of course, I'm glossing over the pain and heartache, but I remember the fun of it. 

 

There was Craig Costello, who I was dating for a bit and he went on to make KRINK; there was Barry MGee and Margaret Kilgallen, and of course Alicia McCarthy. Craig and I were bombing every fucking night, and it was a total blast. Barry was doing his thing, and we were always meeting on the street, and we all had studios and our flats, and it was just really fun and super rich for sure. 

 

I feel like the people that were a part of that group are the ones that really poo poo at the name the the most, perhaps. But I feel like, it's true, we did have something in common. We did work in a weird way that had a strain of common ground for sure. I feel like I'm still super close with Barry, and Alicia's my best friend forever. And it's like there's something about us that I feel…, there was something specific that was a coming together of souls during that time.

 

Graffiti was a social thing for me because we were doing it together, and it was sort of a real freedom in the sense that I didn't want it to be for sale or in my gallery spaces. 

It's also because it was pre-Internet. You couldn't do it now, not with social media. it was just like we had so much energy and it just all went into making little things. I was super into photography, and so we would go to the dark room and print all night, and then the next day we'd go to the printmaking department and make an etching plate with the writing backwards so that we would print on the back of the photo… and those would be our invites for our student shows. When you think of the amount of work that we were putting into things, it’s amazing. And we weren't even on drugs or anything like that. We were just pumped. We just wanted to make shit. SFAI was just something we took mass advantage of. It was open 24 hours a day. You could go there, all the departments were open and accessible. You could go to the photo department and print all night, You had the Gulf War going on, too, so there was a lot of political activity, so it was sort of spilling out onto the street with protests.. .

I didn't even know that you had to ahve a tag. I didn't even know what a tag was when I started. I think I started with RECLAIM, and then I would write REMINISCE, which was so long… so long.

 

Yeah, I would misspell it all the time. I was super happy to do graffiti because I had a hard time at SFAI. My dad had taught there, he went there, and his whole generation was all about SFAI institute. A lot of his students at Davis were, my teachers at SFAI. So it encroached upon me quite a bit… 

 

Graffiti was a major outlet. It was a really creative way to find my own path away from that. So I think that that was a big reason why I sort of started doing it. It was definitely something that neither of my parents did, you know what I mean? That I was sort of happy to take on. There's still a lot of those elements of graffiti in what I do now when I am making ceramic. I'm still spraying my glaze, and I don't think I would've thought of that unless I'd done graffiti.

 

So there's all these things that are a part of me that overlap and cycle back through; it's very cyclical. There's all these different influences on and in my life. A lot of the artists that I grew up with influenced me quite a bit, you know what I mean? There’s my dad's generation that was a big part of my life as a kid. But those early years at SFAI, getting involved with that group of friends, that is where I sort of found my own voice. It took me a long time, but now I see that time as really important to me.

Well, you know what? It's really easy to use. It answered a lot of needs for me.I think that's one of the reasons why I did graffiti was because I'm so impatient. I need to be able to pick something up and use it right away. The fact that you can just open up a bag of clay and start building something right away, I love how very immediate this material is. Aside from the firing, which is after the fact, though. 

 

And you can put them outside. I mean, unless something falls on them or someone throws a rock at it, it's going to last a long time. It doesn't fade. It's so resilient, really. It's also very reactive, emotionally, and so I really wanted a material that would sort of respond back to me. It holds a lot of emotional content just in its makeup. I feel like the clay itself has a real sort of presence of its own. 

 

Yes and no. It's like I am kind of happy to let the work go and exist somewhere else. I'm not so precious about my work.