Ruth Laskey

Ruth Laskey is part of a generation of artists who are revisiting the properties of artworks that are handmade, using materials sourced and created by the artist, rather than assembled from found objects or fabricated by technological means or a studio staff. Laskey’s textile pieces are woven from hand-dyed fibers, and she produces works that have the delicacy of printed images and the textural immediacy of paintings. The geometric structures that make up her art are based on the weaving loom’s own internal logic. Laskey achieves gradients in the color of her shapes by carefully pre-planning and dyeing the threads with varying degrees of intensity. 

The results are often formally reminiscent of the Modernist textiles produced at the famous Bauhaus in Germany in the early 20th century. However, whereas the Bauhaus Modernists approached textiles from the point of view of design and functionality, Laskey’s branch of this lineage is informed, at its core, by painting. This distinction gives her fiber-based works a compelling quality, exculpating the medium of its supposed obligation to decoration and allowing her works a unique simplicity and aesthetic purity. 

Laskey studied art history at the University of California Santa Cruz before deciding to focus on studio art and pursuing graduate work at the California College of the Arts. She initially worked as a painter before turning to focus solely on textiles. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the 11th Biennale de Lyon, Idaho’s Sun Valley Center for the Arts, Lehman College Art Gallery in New York, and the Oakland Museum of California, among others. Laskey lives and works in San Francisco.