Jordan Karney Chaim on Katie Ruiz

Moon Portal, 2021, oil on canvas with Mylar, 38 x 24 in.

[Image description: A silhouetted border fence is set against a dusky sky that fades from pink to indigo. At the center of the image is a portal revealing a desert landscape and a blazing sun. The portal is surrounded by a light green halo. The phases of the moon, rendered in black and silver Mylar, cycle around the portal and through the fence.]

In a virtual studio visit with the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in 2020, Katie Ruiz introduced herself as a Chicana, born in Los Angeles to a Mexican father and a midwestern mother. (1) It is a designation she wears proudly, but did not fully claim as her own until her mid-20s, she explained to me. (2) Identifying as Chicana has helped her make sense of her experience in the world. “It felt like the first time I really had a real secure culture,” she explained to the virtual audience. “Before I felt sort of split in half.” Rebalancing the dualities that have shaped her, both culturally and artistically, is at the heart of Ruiz’s practice, which moves fluidly between painting and sculpture. Fragments of memory, history, and experience are interwoven with family heirlooms and found objects to create works of art that strengthen the intersections of her own multifacetedness. 

Left: Finders, Keepers, 2020, mixed media, 8 x 10 x 5 in.; Right: Tejido Play, 2018, mixed fiber media, 46 x 22 x 2 in.

[Image descriptions: Left: A skein of bright orange yarn, a thick piece of driftwood, a pink and white crocheted doily, and a blond braid are arranged in a stack, held in place by a copper-colored metal frame. Right: A fiber sculpture hangs on a wall. At the top is a brownish knit rectangle with an opening in the middle. It connects to rows of patterns in pink, red, yellow, orange, blue and black. The bottom portion of the sculpture consists of three horizontally winding ropes in pink, yellow and white, that are interwoven with two swathes of synthetic hair--one platinum blond and one dark brown.]

Ruiz describes her practice as a form of meditative puzzling. “I lay [my materials] out and then piece them together,” she told me. “It’s all about how the shapes interlock and work with each other.” The process is similar whether Ruiz is making a painting, sculpture, or something in between, like her recent combinas—explicitly feminine, twenty-first century reinventions of Rauschenberg’s “combines.” In one such example, Finders, Keepers (2020) Ruiz uses the metal exterior of a broken picture frame to support an arrangement containing a whole skein of orange yarn, a hunk of driftwood, one of her grandmother’s crocheted doilies, and an undulating blond braid. Within the frame, the elements are gently stacked, resembling a kind of personal strata, an intimate cross-section of someone’s closet rather than a geological formation. Each object’s apparent banality is countered by its subjective resonance: the yarn recalls a childhood spent crafting; the doily is a vestige of her early years in the care of her abuela, her paternal grandmother who passed away when Ruiz was five; the braid, a relic of the hair and makeup job that brought her to San Diego in 2017.

Communication, 2015, oil on wood board, 60 x 60 x 2 in.

[Image description: Two figures face each other against a backdrop in blue-grays and purple. The figures both wear blue pants, while one is barefoot and the other wears one purple sock. Their heads and upper bodies are draped in a peach blanket that is printed with rows of graphic animal patterns in white, black, green, blue, and yellow.]

For Ruiz, fiber elements function, quite literally, as connective threads across her work and life, beginning with the blanket paintings she first made in 2015. Communication (2015) depicts two standing figures facing each other, draped under a peach blanket patterned with rows of different colored animals. For Ruiz, who trained as a figurative painter, the blanket became a device with which she could abstract the human form, obscuring identity while allowing for a range of narrative possibilities. The use of blankets both introduced a sense of mystery to her paintings—concealing the figures and their activities—and have also come to illustrate a kind of fundamental human unity. All people—across nations, cultures, and classes—use blankets. Blankets surround us from birth until death, providing warmth and security, connection to each other, to home, and to family across time and space.

The Tide is Coming In, 2016, oil on canvas, 60 x 48 in.

[Image description: Two figures stand next to each other in shin-deep water, holding hands. One wears a red bikini bottom, the other, blue swimming trunks with yellow polka dots. Their faces and upper bodies are shrouded in a white blanket printed with animals, insects, and plants in colorful striped designs. The sky behind them turns black as a yellow sunset appears to fade.]

In her search for new patterns to incorporate into her work after exhausting those in her own blanket collection, Ruiz was drawn to Otomí textiles, with their vividly colored flora and fauna embroidered on a white background. (3) She first incorporated Otomí designs in The Tide is Coming (2016). In this painting, a pair of figures hold hands as they stand in shin-deep water. Their heads are draped in a blanket of Ruiz’s own invention, a combination of design elements pieced together from her textile research. Her fascination with the textiles and their symbolism took her to Oaxaca in 2016. It was one of several trips she’s taken to Mexico to deepen her connection to Mexican culture and its expressions (in 2004 she lived briefly in Guanajuato, where she studied printmaking). While in Oaxaca, Ruiz learned backstrap weaving, a technique that can only produce a textile as wide as the body of its maker, something Ruiz found particularly poignant and intimate. 

Learning to weave reinvigorated Ruiz’s connection to her abuela, who had cared for her as a young child in Los Angeles and with whom she had spoken only Spanish. Ruiz remembers her abuela knitting and crocheting constantly. “She could crochet with her eyes shut,” she told me. After her abuela’s passing, the Spanish-speaking stopped. A few years later, her parents divorced, and Ruiz moved with her mother and sisters to Prescott, Arizona, to be near her maternal grandparents. It was a small mountain town where nobody locked their doors; it was also the first place Ruiz experienced anti-Mexican racism. For Ruiz, studying textile work in Mexico reaffirmed the importance of these practices as silent intergenerational conversations about ancestry, pride, and the invisible work of women as caretakers of both people and traditions.

Chicana, 2018, oil on canvas, 60 x 48 in.

[Image description: A figure stands in a room with blue walls and a brown wooden floor, a potted snake plant sits to their right. They have warm tan skin and wear blue socks with turquoise polka dots. Their head and upper body are covered by a white blanket printed with the image of MIckey Mouse. A cloud of colorful objects including tacos, flowers, snakes, and chili peppers swirls above their head.]

In the 2018 painting Chicana, swirling Otomí designs hover around the head of a figure hidden under a Mickey Mouse blanket. In this self-portrait, Ruiz cloaks herself with that iconic marker of American culture, giving form to the simultaneous sense of protection and confinement that comes with her American identity. The colorful symbols of her Mexican heritage call to her in a language that her preteen self—struggling to blend in in Prescott—might have responded to: a taco, an avocado, a stepped pyramid, a paintbrush. This painting suggests a conversation between an adolescent Ruiz with a burgeoning curiosity about her own ancestry, and her contemporaneous self, an artist whose work is unapologetically reflective of her worldview: buzzingly vibrant, open, strong, and deeply rooted in Chicana identity.    

During a talk she gave on the occasion of her 2021 exhibition Border Portals, Ruiz explained that she used to shy away from the political in her work, but now realizes that she has no choice but to lean into it. (4) Her words echo the credo of second-wave feminism—the personal is political—the notion that that women’s (or people’s) personal experiences are determined by the often-repressive socio-political circumstances in which they exist. This realization empowered her to take more direct political aim in her most recent work. The paintings and sculptures included in Border Portals respond to a succession of changes to United States immigration policies between 2018 and 2021 that, at various times, separated migrant children from their parents, forced asylum seekers to wait for interminable periods of time in Mexico, and led to a surge of unaccompanied minors being sent across the US-Mexico border alone.

Seeking Asylum, 2021, oil on canvas with silver leaf, 60 x 96 x 2 in.

[Image description: Four girls with brown skin and eyes lay in a row. Each wears a blue surgical face mask. The first three look out at the viewer while the fourth turns away. Their bodies are covered by a shared silver blanket. The cloudy night sky is behind them. The reflective silver of the blanket spreads across the rest of the canvas, except for a small portal in the upper right corner that opens onto a blue sky.]

Early in the pandemic, Ruiz was hired as part of a team of local bilingual artists to teach art classes for the unaccompanied migrant children being housed at the San Diego Convention Center—young girls who were at especially high risk of exploitation. The arresting monumental diptych Seeking Asylum (2021) is Ruiz’s personal reckoning with her own sense of helplessness. It depicts four young girls laying side by side, tucked under a shared Mylar emergency blanket. Three of them turn to meet the viewer’s gaze while the fourth faces away. Their warm brown eyes convey a quiet alertness; the rest of their faces are covered by blue surgical masks. This group portrait is a composite image assembled from Ruiz’s recollections of her time with the migrant girls. (5) She worked with different children every day and never saw their full faces. Ruiz envisioned the border portals for them, as a kind of (admittedly idealistic) alternative to the wretched ordeal that they were only just beginning. 

Migration is Natural, 2021, oil on canvas with Mylar, 38 x 24 in.

[Image description: A slatted border fence is silhouetted against the sunrise, which fades from orange to yellow, to pink. A swarm of monarch butterflies fly around the fence. At the center, a portal reveals clouds moving across a blue sky. The fence casts long purple shadows onto the pink foreground, where a young child, rendered in dark muted tones, stands in the lower left corner, looking up at three oversized butterflies.]

Accordingly, Ruiz’s border portals are refreshingly—and intentionally—welcoming. She uses color, texture, and a certain “softness,” she says, to “let people in without shutting them down.” Many elements from past bodies of work are present in the border portals series: jubilant color, celestial symbolism, blanket imagery, embroidery, and fiber sculpture. Various shades of pink—a color of powerful significance for Ruiz—appear again and again. Paintings such as Moon Portal and Migration is Natural (both 2021), are meditative depictions of a desolate border-scape that set the massive slatted border fence against an early morning or crepuscular sky. Each painting’s centrally-placed portal reveals blue skies and new topographies, while moon cycles and monarch migrations illustrate the forces of nature that transcend even the most fortified human-made barriers. In Ruiz’s reimagining, the US-Mexico border becomes much more forgiving— it is a locus of exchange, a signifier of possibility, an invitation to dream.

Jordan Karney Chaim is an art historian, writer, and independent curator based in San Diego.

Notes

1. Katie Ruiz, “Virtual Studio Visit,” interview with Jill Dawsey, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, April 29, 2020, video, 43:33 https://www.mcasd.digital/conversations/katie-ruiz

2. All quotes from Katie Ruiz are taken from interviews with the author between November 2021 and January 2022, unless otherwise noted.

3. Otomí textiles are produced by the Otomí people, an indigenous population who live primarily in discontinuous territories across central Mexico. The embroidery technique they often use is called tenango. Ruiz discussed how she was particularly interested in the layered history of the art form—how embroidery was first brought to Mexico by the Spanish, yet many Otomí designs are said to originate from cave paintings that predate the colonial period.

4. Katie Ruiz: Border Portals, Keller Gallery, Point Loma Nazarene University, November 8 – December 3, 2021.

5. Ruiz was not able to take photographs while working with the children in the convention center. She also made clear that of all of the country’s holding facilities, conditions at the San Diego convention center were some of the best, and that the children there were given actual fabric blankets, not Mylar. The Mylar blankets are drawn from their prevalence in media images of the most recent border crisis.