Gallery Hike & Conversation with Artist Ruby Merritt

Portrait from WeUsSquared collaboration video and
installation performance with George Afedzi Hughes

Ruby Merritt is a Buffalo based professional artist, adjunct professor and teaching artist. Growing up in between the Great Lakes the lush natural ecosystems of wetlands, old growth forests, and gorge canyons immensely influences Merritt’s artwork, research and interactive performance work. Merritt received her BFA, concentrating in Drawing and Painting from the State University of New York at New Paltz and a Masters of Fine Arts at the University at Buffalo, in 2013. 

With a strong background of environmental studies, such as botany, geology, and conservation, Merritt has used those strong connections to science to further influence her art practice by exploring the connections where art and science collide and mix curiosities, believing that we need to perceive the natural world as an art object. 

A familiar niche for Merritt’s artwork is the contemporary art and science, eco-art or ’bio-art’ realm. Producing work that is process based, using earth cycles, such as rock and water cycles, to manipulate and nurture her work. Printmaking, photography and bookmaking have become an incipient nesting ground for displaying and capturing the shapes and patterns mimicking and documenting nature’s visual wonder. 

https://www.rubymerritt.com/