Ruby Neri (b. 1970, San Francisco) draws upon 20th century West Coast traditions as well as a global catalogue of art historical and anthropological modes. She depicts the human body as a porous instrument of pleasure, terror, and everything in between; this places her within a lineage of recent Los Angeles-based artists that includes Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, and Charles Ray, while her penchant for hand-driven craft connects her to the Bay Area Figurative and Funk movements. The ceramic vessels that have dominated her production recently evoke both earthy tactility and psychological intimacy. Neri’s use of sprayed glazes links her ceramics to the street art she produced in the late 1990s as a member of what would become the San Francisco-based Mission School, connecting a contemporary urban art form with the archaic power of pre-historical wall-painting and object-making.

In 2018 Ruby Neri was the subject of a two-person exhibition, Alicia McCarthy and Ruby Neri / MATRIX 270 at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. She has had solo exhibitions at the Los Angeles Museum of Art in 2016 and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in 2003. She has participated in group shows including The Domestic Plane: New Perspectives on Tabletop Art Objects, Objects Like Us, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2018); From Funk to Punk, Left Coast Ceramics, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York (2017); Fertile Ground: Art and Community in California, a collaboration with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Oakland Museum of California, Oakland (2014); Energy That is All Around: Mission School, Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York (2014); Busted, High Line Commission, High Line Art, New York (2013); and Made in L.A. 2012, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012). Her work is in the public collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Neri lives and works in Los Angeles.