Artist Statement
Ernestine Ruben lives in Princeton, New Jersey and is an internationally known artist, who grew up surrounded by art and artists. She received degrees in the history of Art, Painting and Sculpture, and Art Education. She has taught art (including photography) for many years. She has devoted the past 25 years to photography; how it enters and enhances our lives and relates to other art forms.
Her experimentation and variety have been extensive. After beginning with silver images, she expanded to photography and dance performances, sculptures, glass, and papermaking. She has also worked in platinum, gum dichromate, and encaustics. She is now combining digital applications to the earliest processes. Ruben continues to push the boundaries of photography through her diverse concepts and processes.
She works with the human being as her launching point and often injects the vitality and emotions of human life into other subjects such as landscape and archeological sites. Her work challenges, invites, and needs the viewer to participate in the visual experience of her images. About her work Ruben says, “As all things human have always been my center, I constantly research our meaning as humans both physically and spiritually and apply these perceptions to my art work. There is an ongoing inquiry into the process of finding the appropriate physical form for my visual ideas”. She continues, “How can our imaginations take on real life qualities? Does light move, can the photographic image go beyond that which one sees? Do we feel the flow of life? In their entirely my works offer a continuing reflection of human survival. I seek to make us aware of the sensuous character of body, spirit, nature, space and material.”
Her workshops are well known for her interest in the creative process and the development of artistic careers of each individual student. Her workshops are held worldwide.
Her work is in many private and public collections including the Philadelphia, Houston and Detroit Museums of Art as well as the Museum of Modern Art, the Maison Europeene de la Photographie and Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. She has had recent solor shows at the Philadelphia Museum, John Stevenson Gallery in New York, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the Stanford Unversity Museum, and her work has recently been at the Fotofest in Houston. Her work is found in 8 monographs as well as many other publications. The latest monograph, “In Human Touch” won the award of the Best Photography Book of 2002 by the International Publishers Association.
James Steward, Director of the Princeton University Museum of Art recently wrote, “Ruben’s images inscribe themselves as amongst the most powerful and possibly the most enduring works of late twentieth century photography”.
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