Laura Ruby Artist

About Laura Ruby

Laura Ruby is a 2015 Hawaii Living Treasure Honoree and a 2008 recipient of the Hawai'i Individual Artist Fellowship (the highest honor in the visual arts).

She exhibited her "Nancy Drew Series" of prints at the Honolulu Academy of Arts in 2005, and in 1995 exhibited the prints there along with an installation sculpture, The Mystery of the Open Book. In 2001 she exhibited recent prints in the series at the Ramsay Galleries in Honolulu, Hawai'i. The series is about the art of artmaking and the art of detection has also been exhibited at the Georgia Southern University Art Gallery, the Museum of Nebraska Art, Texas Wesleyan University East Room Gallery, Morningside College Eppley Art Gallery (Iowa), Denison University Art Gallery (Ohio), the New York Society for Ethical Culture, and the Peoria Art Guild (Illinois). Her essay and selections of her prints from the "Nancy Drew Series" are published in Rediscovering Nancy Drew (University of Iowa Press, 1995).

Her ongoing "Diamond Head Series" currently has over 60 prints, drawings and site-specific installation sculptures, and is about land and power in Hawai'i–about the exploitation of land, and its resources and people and their livelihoods. In 1998 the "Diamond Head Series" was featured in Contemporary Impressions–Journal of the American Print Alliance, and there have been solo exhibitions of the series in California, Oregon, and on the Hawaiian Islands of Oahu, Kauai and the Big Island.

In 2016 she installed a large site-specific enamel-on-metal wall sculpture, The Battle of Mōʻiliʻili--about a historical event in her neighborhood. In 1994 she completed a large site-specific sculpture, Chinatown–Site of Passage, commissioned by the City and County of Honolulu. This artwork features the Honolulu Chinatown and waterfront neighborhood, including its history and physical structures of bridges and building profiles and rooflines in the community. She also received a grant from the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions to create and exhibit an installation sculpture, A View with a Room, at the Hawaii Loa College Gallery.

Her prints and sculptures have been shown in national and international juried and invitational exhibitions including "Creating Women" (Pennsylvania), "Shared Visions: The Art of Collaboration" (Washington), the "27th Bradley National Print and Drawing Exhibition" (Illinois), "Game Show" (Washington), “Digital Elements” (New York), and the "17th University of Dallas Print Invitational" (Texas). Her print Landed Committee–Annexation, was part of the inaugural exhibition at the Hawai'i State Art Museum, and currently Camouflage at Diamond Head--For Ray Jerome Baker is on display.

She taught art and honors at the University of Hawaii for 34 years, and she edited the book Mo‘ili‘ili–The Life of a Community (2005) and co-authored the books Honolulu Town (2012) and Honokaa Town (2015) with Ross W. Stephenson.

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