Born and raised in New York, Ruby Howell is a multidisciplinary artist and educator whose practice spans sculpture, painting, and drawing. With a BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design, Howell creates immersive worlds that examine vulnerability, transformation, and the multiplicity of human experience. Drawing from mythology, ecological systems, dreams, memory, and art history, their work exists within spaces that feel simultaneously seductive, ominous, and emotionally charged.
Growing up along the Hudson River, Howell spent much of their childhood constructing fantasies within forests and natural landscapes. That imaginative impulse remains central to their artistic practice today, though it has evolved into a deeper exploration of identity, instability, and perpetual becoming. Through hybrid creatures, fragmented environments, and shifting forms, Howell embraces contradiction as both material and concept. Wood meets metal, soft textures confront sharp surfaces, and synthetic materials coexist beside organic elements, creating work that resists fixed definitions and celebrates fluidity in all its forms.
Howell’s process is rooted in experimentation across mediums including painting, woodworking, casting, metalwork, and drawing. Their work often inhabits a space between formation and dissolution, where certainty is intentionally withheld. Influenced by artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Hilma af Klint, James Jean, and Nick Cave, Howell creates psychologically immersive environments that invite viewers to encounter ambiguity not as absence, but as possibility.
Currently Exhibiting in: New York, NY
Instagram: @rockznrubiez
Featured Artwork at Bushwick Gallery
Title: The Beeches
Year of Creation: 2025
Medium: Acrylic, gel medium, graphite powder, and paper on panel
Dimensions: 11 x 18 inches
Edition Type: Unique, 1 of 1
Location: New York, NY
Price: $800
ADD TO YOUR COLLECTION
Description
The Beeches reimagines the visual language of the Hudson River School through a lens of instability, ambiguity, and transformation. Inspired by childhood visits to museums and an enduring fascination with Hudson River School paintings, Ruby Howell revisits these historical landscapes not to romanticize them, but to unravel their certainty. Rather than opening into a luminous vision of nature, the work arrives at a darker threshold where forms dissolve and nothing feels fully fixed or resolved.
Built through layered applications of acrylic, gel medium, graphite powder, and paper, the surface of the painting emerges through constellations of pixelated marks and fragmented textures. Figures and environments appear to hover between formation and disappearance, creating a visual space suspended in perpetual becoming. Loosely referencing traditional landscape painting, Howell abstracts the familiar environment into something psychologically charged and emotionally unstable.
In The Beeches, Howell explores beauty within uncertainty. The work reflects an ongoing interest in fluid identity, transformation, and the undefined spaces where vulnerability and power coexist. Rather than seeking resolution, the painting embraces openness, suggesting that transformation itself may be the most honest state of being.
Exhibition Information
Exhibition Title: Botanic Bodies
Theme: Organic elegance, natural forms, and expansive growth
Exhibition Dates: May 14 – May 21, 2026
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 14 / 6 PM – 8 PM
Private Showings and Events: Invite only throughout the week