![Rough Ruby Arts Collective]()
Rough Ruby Arts Collective
Exhibits Collaborations Creative Endeavors
Creating Art for Social Change
Current Artist Full Members:
Laura BenAmots . Hellen Dunn
Cathleen Meadows . Ceil Horowitz . Hannah Star Rogers
Current Guest Artist Member: Marsha Gold Gayer
BenAmots is largely driven by the co-dependent tensions between strength and vulnerability, belonging and isolation, hope and struggle. Motivated by a commitment to inspire dialogue about challenging social issues of our day, BenAmots' paintings, drawings and installations explore and express varied dimensions of human frailty and perseverance, humanity and the natural world.
BIO New York born painter, Laura BenAmots, spent her formative years in the Middle East. She studied painting at the historic Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, earned her BFA from the Tyler College of Art & Design at Temple University and has a MFA with a split emphasis in Book Arts, Printmaking and Painting from the Philadelphia University of the Arts.
Career highlights and honors include: 2019 Creative Advocacy invitational Collective Voices exhibit in Stillwater OK: 2017-18 3-Month Machine Shop Artist Residency award, Abstract Contemporary Women exhibit invitational in CO; 2016 Featured Artist in the online publication Collateral; 2015 International Artist Residency at ArtHub; 2014 International Artist Residency and exhibition in the International Contemporary Artist Exhibition 2014 in Assisi IT; 2012 recognition as Visual Artist of the Year for the Pikes Peak Region in Colorado.
Select Publications: Two books have been published about her work: BATTLE PORTRAITS Wounded Lions Wounded Lambs (published and distributed by the Art Book Project battleportraits.com) and Eros On Canvas: the erotic paintings of Laura BenAmots (co-published by Last Gasp Press, San Francisco CA and Smokemuse Press CO).
Cathleen Meadows is a conceptual artist, art therapist, poet and author. Her work expresses sensitive and evocative responses to internal emotions and external events. She is a former member of the Spark Co-Op Gallery, an associate at Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute and visual artist for Colorado’s Young Audiences Program. The Machine Shop in Colorado Springs and numerous schools throughout the state have selected Meadows to participate for their artist-in-residence programs.
"NO RECESS: THE LOCKDOWN IS" bodybag installation night
In response to barbaric heartbreaking gun violence, Meadows has created a two-fold project NO RECESS: THE LOCKDOWN GENERATION. (NoRecess/LockdownGeneration on Instagram, norecess:thelockdowngeneration on Twitter) The art component consists of a series of memorial installations using vinyl child-sized body bags and various other materials. The political component will be mailing (or personal delivery) of body bags and toe tags to politicians receiving NRA funding. Meadows will be collaborating with local chapters of Moms Demand Action & Students Demand Action (everytownforgunsafety.org) and March For Our Lives (neveragain.com) for this portion of the project.
Meadows is using the metaphor of “home” for her Eco-Sanctuaries installation using family photographs, grandmother’s china, fabrics, food, spices, bones, nests, garden sculptures, backyard memorial installation and more.
Recent & Select Exhibits:
2018 “Artists in Action” Manitou Arts Center, CO
2017 “Gun Shy” The Machine Shop, Colorado Springs, CO
2015 “Poetic Images/Constructing Meaning” Manitou Arts Center, CO
1999 - 2001 Wake Up Little Susie: Pregnancy and Power Prior to Roe v Wade (a collaborative installation) traveled to over 30 universities and galleries throughout the United States
When asked what she wanted to be at age 3, she said "artist." Ceil Horowitz is inspired by and driven to capture, depict and exalt the life of the "little guy", counting herself among them.Her hope is to inspire dialogue and discovery through her paintings. Most recently she traveled on a grant to the Druze village of Yarka in Israel's Carmel Mountains to draw the elders. Since 2012 she has spent her winters painting "Subway Musicians" in the NYC subway system. In addition, Ceil has just completed traveling to Colorado's first 100 breweries where she has created folk inspired on location "portraits" of the breweries.
To Sea
My wax now fused to freshly mollusced sands,
peeled back the shell, poured in the boiling sea,
and from blue flesh yet she a gleaming white.
While ocean touched her brief array she glowed
Yet when I packed her in wool cloth she grayed.
If time should take me back to those late waves,
I would return to that great beach the pearl.
Excerpt from the title poem off the manuscript
To Sea
* * *
Dwarf-Crested Irises in Canaan, West Virginia
The realist masters have avoided
the Appalachians and I have to assume
That this is because fayeland is difficult
to paint. What to do with the sounds of mushrooms
unfolding through fallen hemlocks? How to ensure
the advancement of each tiny waterfall with the
enhancements that are the landscapists’ gift?
Excerpt from “Dwarf Crested Irises in
Canaan, West Virginia,” which first
appeared in Faerie Magazine 38
(Summer): 2017.
* * *
With the care required to
Pack and ship lichen beginnings worldwide
The prize the moss from its long term
Abode the only home it has ever known,
Estranged from plants by our insistence
On the move, our nature against theirs
Electro-pulses we knew we knew where
There before the stars could be measured
Always traveling
and using up.
Excerpt from
“Interfacing AM Frequencies Through t
he Core of a Willow Stem to Make a
Divining Rod for the Future,” which
first appeared in The Ekphrastic Review,
November 2018
Hannah Star Rogers is a poet, curator and art-science scholar. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the University of Edinburgh. Her poems and reviews have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Tupelo Quarterly, The Carolina Quarterly, and The Southern Women’s Review. Her flash fiction has been honored by Nat. Brut and Glimmer Train. She has received the Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship. She has held artist residencies at the Djerassi, ArtHub, Tofte Lake Center, Catswalk, the Arctic Circle in Finland, and National Park Service writing residencies in both Acadia, Maine and the Everglades, FL. Her scholarly publications on art and science have appeared in Leonardo, Configurations, and Photomediations.
1.
Through tulip tree’s yet fragrant wood the tide
at night exposed its tender meat for snails.
The pods yet dangle as a weeping chime
as through them moves the ochre mangrove crab.
2.
The open shell its tongue unfolds in tide
its open whirl the sun pulls back and dries
The ocean curls around the pressing oars
overhead cadence and the foam unfurls.
