RUBY SKY STILER

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York announced the acquisition of Stiler’s work as part of its 2025 acquisitions, marking the artist’s first inclusion in the museum’s collection alongside emerging and mid-career artists reshaping the institution’s understanding of contemporary figuration.

Early years

Ruby Sky Stiler was born in Portland, Maine in 1979 and spent her childhood in New Mexico. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she trained as a printmaker, developing technical skills that continue to inform her layered approach to image-making. Stiler now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Ruby Sky Stiler Artworks

Ruby Sky Stiler’s practice draws from diverse time periods, artistic movements, and genres, imbuing familial and political structures with feminist values and insights. Her work reimagines and recasts the history of figuration and the nude through intricate processes of disruption, fragmentation, and layering.

Sculpture and relief

Stiler’s monochromatic sculptures and reliefs evoke the forms of classical antiquities and the fractured aesthetic of Cubist painting and collage. Rather than using marble, stone, or ceramic, she works with foam core, acrylic resin, plaster, and discarded elements from her studio, incorporating both the monumental and the cast-off. Her works simulate the appearance of stone, marble, and ceramic through iconography borrowed from ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman art, yet reveal a hand-built technique upon close inspection. Her hydrocal plaster wall reliefs (2013–ongoing) evolved from experimentation with plaster into a profound inquiry into the history of classical plaster casts and the fluctuation of their value and meaning over time.

Relief paintings

Stiler’s relief paintings combine resin, acrylic paint, graphite, and heavy watercolour paper into layered tiles that recall modernist block-printed textiles and architectural details. These paintings rupture and playfully subvert the art historical hegemony of the modernist grid. Central to this subversion, her collaged figures challenge gendered art historical archetypes, depicting lesser-known tropes such as a father with his children, lone matriarchs, and female artists.

Geometric paintings and Cubist reinterpretation

Stiler’s paintings continue to reenvision 20th-century abstraction, especially the predominantly male Cubist movement that emerged around 1907 and 1908. She turns the tables on the historically gendered dichotomy in fine art, transferring the role of women from subjects of paintings to creators of images. Her richly patterned, geometric compositions are assembled from hundreds of small, cropped drawings transferred into paint, creating mosaic-like surfaces. Works such as Large Blue Mother (2025) combine figurative and geometric forms, depicting maternal figures and children while rejecting idealisation in favour of novel ways of imagining the nude.

Caryatids and ‘Long Pose’

In her 2025 exhibition Long Pose at Alexander Gray Associates, New York, Stiler presented new paintings and a large-scale bas-relief mural encircling the exhibition space. The abstracted, sinuous figures lining the walls are inspired by caryatids, the classical architectural form of female figures bearing structural weight. In Stiler’s hands, these forms move beyond gendered symbolism to become universal emblems of resilience.

Select Awards and Accolades

• Socrates Sculpture Park Emerging Artist Fellowship, Queens, New York, 2010

Ruby Sky Stiler Exhibitions

Ruby Sky Stiler has been the subject of both solo exhibitions and group exhibitions at important institutions and galleries. Below is a selection of important exhibitions.

Select solo exhibitions

• Long Pose, Alexander Gray Associates, New York, 2025
• Frieze LA Solo Presentation, Alexander Gray Associates, Los Angeles, 2025
• New Patterns, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, 2022
• Group Relief, Fairfield University Art Museum, Connecticut, 2020
• Fresco, Saint-Gaudens Memorial Park, Cornish, New Hampshire, 2019
• Ghost Versions, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut, 2015
• Sun Breaker, Locust Projects, Miami, 2015
• Inherited and Borrowed Types, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Oregon, 2010

Select group exhibitions

• Friends & Lovers, FLAG Art Foundation, New York, 2023
• No Forms, Hill Art Foundation, New York, 2022
• Classic Beauty: 21st-Century Artists on Ancient [Greek] Form, Providence College Galleries, Rhode Island, 2018
• The Times, FLAG Art Foundation, New York, 2017
• We Are What We Hide, Institute of Contemporary Art, Maine College of Art & Design, Portland, 2013
• Socrates Sculpture Park Emerging Artist Fellowship Exhibition, Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, 2010

To be kept up to date with upcoming exhibitions featuring Ruby Sky Stiler, follow her on Ocula.

Collections

Ruby Sky Stiler’s works are held in the permanent collections of:

• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
• The Museum of Modern Art, New York
• Fairfield University Art Museum, Connecticut
• Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine
• The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York
• Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, Rhode Island

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Website and Instagram

Ruby Sky Stiler’s website can be found at rubyskystiler.com.

More Reading

Ruby Sky Stiler’s practice has been featured in leading publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Architectural Digest, and BOMB Magazine.

Ruby Sky Stiler FAQs

Ocula | 2026