HOLDING THE POSE
New York City, October 2025
With a multidisciplinary approach, RUBY SKY STILER subverts our preconceived ideas of the male and female bodies and their place in art and society. Stiler’s practice showcases women archetypes as protagonists rather than muses, whilst male-like shapes tend to resemble softness and serenity. In Long Pose, the Brooklyn-based artist’s first solo exhibition at Alexander Gray Associates in New York City, sculpted abstract figures inspired by Greek caryatids share the space with sketched, intimate geometric paintings, creating a whole new universe that expands from collage, sculpture and installation to real-life experience. Born in Portland, Maine, and raised in Taos, New Mexico, Stiler welcomes SHADOWPLAY to a slice of her mind – where motherhood, work obsession, and historical artistic references exist in harmony.
Left Father holding Child, 2025, Canvas, acrylic, pencil, jade and adhesive on panel, Courtesy the artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York, © 2025 Ruby Sky Stiler
Hi Ruby! How is your day looking?
I’m good! It’s always a mix of things, like doctors, kids, and work. I’m going to a play with one of my best friends tonight, so it’s just like a good classic New York City day.
What were some of your main artistic references to begin with, and how have they developed over time?
I grew up in the mountains next to a Native American pueblo that was adjacent to our town, so I think the beauty of the landscape and the beauty of the pueblo – the dances and costumes – would have probably been early influences, other than my family. There were also so many rich references in art, from Georgia O'Keeffe to Agnes Martin. 40 years later, weirdly, I have so many influences – that’s almost a part of what my work is, to look at other artists and what they’ve done and to have a perspective on not just the way that I make or draw something, but what the culture of that artist’s life was.
A lot of times, I look at representations of mothers with children and try to figure out how to alter that. I try to make that my own, to empower the female figure, empower the muse, or turn the female muse into the action part of the painting. On my wall, you can see these early Louise Nevelson sculptures, and Nevelson is an artist that I'm completely obsessed with, that I have thought a lot about and written a lot about, not just from the perspective of the work that she makes, but also her life and how it parallels mine. Both of us had these chaotic childhoods and have a tendency to work within a grid, repurposing fragments of things into a new form that makes sense all on its own – so she’s an important artist to me, and so is Martin. I also look a lot at the Fauvist and Modernist painters like [Henri] Matisse, [Paul] Cézanne, Van Gogh, and the Cubist artists. And certainly, I've been interested in World War II and post-war American female abstract expressionists. The world that they were working in and their identity as Americans were so different from ours, so it’s such an interesting perspective on what we might be compelled to make, what we need to make and what is important now.
Right Large Blue Mother, 2025, Canvas, acrylic, pencil, jade, and adhesive on panel, Courtesy the artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York, © 2025 Ruby Sky Stiler
Was becoming an artist something you had always seen yourself achieving while growing up?
You know, when there is a family and the parents are doctors, or there is some type of [professional] convention? I think art was the number one value in my family. My dad is an artist, but not in the way that I am. He paints houses, and he cares a lot about art, but he’s not a professional artist who lives in a city. And my mom was an artist in spirit, not in practice. I felt like art was one of those things that had a huge value in my family, combined with the fact that I grew up in a rural part of the world. I grew up in Taos, New Mexico, which is the Wild West – it’s an unusual, counterculture community. There weren’t great schools or opportunities for more conventional academic learning, so I didn't learn any other skills. I also think that I was always super ambitious. I was the type of kid who, when we would have big snowstorms, would start to roll this fall of snow to make a snowman, and then my sister would be like, ‘Okay, that will be the bottom,’ and then I was like, ‘No, that’s just the toe.’ [Laughs] I just wanted to make things with my hands, to create things that were big.
Does your sister do art as well?
My sister is also an artist, and we are almost like alter egos. She lives in New Mexico, where I grew up, and I think our work is equally important to each of us. But we have very different artistic practices and communities.
Your pieces often portray female bodies existing in this free manner through a more empowering gaze, rather than the idea of women as the muse. What is your relationship with your body, and how do you explore that in your art?
That's such a good question. There is something of self-portraiture in the work that I make, and there's also something that I hope is aspirational and universal. When I look at some of my paintings [for this upcoming show], it’s almost like a mosaic. But when you see the art in person, they are sculptural, which is something that can be missed in images. When you look at the composition on a somatic, physical level, I can feel the embrace; I can feel that closeness. I can feel the connection, for example, that I have with my daughter when I hold her like that. There's an intimacy that I think is almost like an arrow through time of women with children, from the Madonna [paintings] or even the Venus of Willendorf, this fertility figure, this intimacy of motherhood. But I also relate to the women who are unmoored from domestic responsibilities, and I think it's important to put a lot of iconography of that out. When I had children, I felt this crushing pressure that came from all those images of motherhood; they're all around us. I feel it's important to put forward pictures that represent women in other states of action, and a lot of images of men with children, men in these more domestic, gentle scenarios, being the object of the painting, so people can have aspirational images of parenthood. Alongside what the composition is, the making of the artwork is very important to my body, this activity of making. I work on a table, and my work takes a long time. Each of those paintings takes maybe six weeks, and my hands are all over it. So, I'm putting all of those little tiny pieces together into a new format, and that activity is grounding to me and important. If I'm away from it for too long, I almost feel like a siren call to come back to that action of putting order into the chaos.
Left Artist with Bather, 2025, Canvas, acrylic, pencil, jade, and adhesive on panel, Courtesy the artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York, © 2025 Ruby Sky Stiler
Tell me more about Long Pose, your first solo exhibition at Alexander Gray Associates.
The show has seven paintings in it, and they are contextualised within this monumental wall sculpture. The sculpture is also the title of the show, Long Pose; it refers to live drawing. In the early days of academic art school, there was the ‘life room’, which is where there would be a live model, and she would be doing long and short poses. A short pose would be quick, ten or five-minute poses, and a long pose would be one that she would hold for hours, throughout the day, so the artist could keep coming back to it.
The title Long Pose is important for me, circling back to what we were touching on earlier, because of this idea that we are holding this pose in life for a long time, and then we give that pose to the next person and to the person after that, as we were creating something on a continuum. We are connecting to the past and the future, and that in itself is a long pose. The figures and sculpture are related to the Caryatid figures in ancient Greek architecture, those female figures that were holding up the walls of the Acropolis. In my re-envisioning of the Caryatid figure in this show, there is this huge sculpture with three big figures that stretch around the room, and it even intersects with the doorway. So, I am looking at the Caryatids from a less genderised point of view – it’s not just a female figure; it’s a universal one, which is important to me, to think about how we connect and how we are universally connected, what is our shared humanity, putting aside our differences.
The long pose, as a reference to academia and drawing, is important as well, because the academic setting was one where female artists were historically excluded. Women were not allowed into the life drawing room, only if they were the figure model. So, this is important in terms of how I am reinventing these figures and bringing new life to them and framing not just my lived life but my aspiration. I am showing the painter, the male muse, the father with child, this image of a cropped body with a long breast, which is a representation of an old woman, who I think has been completely forgotten and disenfranchised. And there is a representation of three women who are not connected through domestic responsibilities; they are just talking. So, I am building a language that I’ve established, and I am stretching into a new language, and I am looking towards what I can do next with this process and these materials.
How did motherhood change the way you create, and how did it change you as a Person?
Did you ever listen to or read Ninth Street Women? It basically traces [female Abstract Expressionist painters] Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, these iconic artists who were married to, for example, Jackson Pollock and William De Kooning, and their choice not to have children because they had to choose either their art or motherhood. When I had my first child, who is 12 now, it was a big identity crisis for me. I didn’t know what to expect, as I didn’t have any models of an egalitarian relationship. I knew my husband; we met in grad school at Yale, we are both artists, and I know that this part of me is important to him. But I also had only seen women who gave up everything to be parents, so I didn't have an archetype. I think motherhood changed me because I felt like I had to carve that out and create that, and it took a lot of strength, perseverance, a good partner that shares the all- consuming responsibility of parenthood with me, and a supportive community of artists, of women artists. They are friends and an important part of my foundation: we’re talking, problem-solving, and complaining together all the time. I think having children changed me a lot as an artist; it was very important to my work. I’m obsessed with my practice, singularly dedicated to it in a way, and I think that if I didn't have this outlet in my work, this obsession would be directed at my children, which can be painful. So I'm grateful that I don't do that, because I've experienced it in my family, and it's a lot of pressure.
Right Three Blue Women, 2025, Canvas, acrylic, pencil, jade, and adhesive on panel, Courtesy the artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York, © 2025 Ruby Sky Stiler
You previously said that, to begin with, you chose to portray men in the workplace, which ended up with more stiff and traditionally masculine figures. Then you decided to explore the male body in more thoughtful scenarios, such as men with their children. Is that something you still prioritise in your art?
Yeah, I have been representing these kinds of archetypal female figures, pared down, almost like shapes that have been inherited from every other artist that ever made anything throughout world history. And there’s something special about that because feeling connected to the past is important to me in terms of my connection with the future, in a spiritual sense of being alive. But I try to complicate the simplicity of that by complicating the gender or the sex, and I had a hard time with that – I think we are just so conditioned to look at women. Women look at women, men look at women, we all look at fashion, most people look at porn, and we all look at advertising. Those [female] forms are so much more culturally attractive that I had a hard time figuring out how to make something that somebody would want to look at with male geometry, and it just wasn't working. It wasn't an intellectual project to complicate motherhood or parenthood from a feminist perspective. It was an intuitive project, but it definitely does complicate parenthood from a feminist perspective. Because I wanted to start putting out pictures of men in these different positions, and when I started to put them with their children, I somehow attached it to geometry that was more forgiving, more beautiful and curvy. You could spend time with that; it wasn't intimidating. Even though my paintings are almost just shapes, you could take away one little thing, and it would just be shapes floating in space; the female body parts read so differently than the male body parts for a reason. You know, men have been really bad; they can be scary and intimidating, and you don't necessarily want to look at them naked, because they've abused their power for so long. It's been interesting to kind of explore that, like, this penis is just a gentle shape, and yet, male nudes hit different. [Laughs] When I’m making a body of work, it’s important to me that I’m bringing these complicated, more confrontational and less comfortable kinds of iconography. In this show, one of my favourite paintings portrays a reclining male nude with his arm over his head, and I love that composition, the geometry of it and the tension between the two figures, kind of this negative space. But I love that frontal-facing female figure that is kind of in the background; she looks so powerful, and the male nude is kind of performing for us.
Your works are so rich in detail, so impressive. You said it takes about six weeks to finish a piece, but how does your process normally look?
My process is very experimental, and I feel like my particular type of intelligence comes from experimentation, from my body and invention in a hands-on way. During my undergrad, I went to a school for printmaking, and I hated the rigidity of it. I’ve always been a very interdisciplinary artist, but the problem of trying to turn something that is flat into something dimensional and sculptural always stuck with me – that’s almost at the heart of my process. There are so many different journeys over the last 25 years, but the pieces that are in this body of work now are actually this combination of sculpture, printmaking, and drawing. I start by making a lot of drawings using pencil on a type of paper that's called Yupo, plastic paper, so I can make sketches and doodles. Sometimes I let my children do drawings; a lot of my daughter's drawings are in them, and she's the best artist. There are a lot of high references to vintage textiles and even contemporary fashion, and there are low references, such as cartoons that I grew up with like Calvin and Hobbes, The Berenstain Bears, and Pokémon, [also] whatever is flowing in and out of my house and studio, and then a lot of my own doodles and figure drawings that I'm trying to work out and stuff. All of that gets drawn onto these pieces of vellum paper. Then I prepare canvas in this particular way, laying down layers and layers of paint that's mixed with marble dust, almost like a smooth and ambiguous surface. I put a wet layer of paint, put my drawings on top of that layer, and put weights on top of them. When they dry, I can peel off the paper, and my drawings have transferred into the paint. So, it's like a printmaking process. It kind of looks like ceramic, stone, or paper, or, you know, it doesn't. But it's actually playing with painting; it's really painting, just made in a perverted way, in the hardest way. [Laughs]
Do you think that the art industry is more open to female artists than when you started professionally?
I think it is. There is the fact that I have this life as a testament to the progress, but I still think that – and this might not even be gendered – any artist has to be very inventive to create a sustainable life. I think you have to be punk and willing to let go of certain luxuries if your priority is to make things that are challenging, because there is a connection between giving the people what they want, commerce and art, especially in the United States. Things are always changing a lot, and I feel like I’ve grown and have gotten more opportunities at the right cadence for myself, so I think that there are more opportunities for artists who are women.
What motivates you to keep creating?
It’s not an intellectual motivation. It’s a requirement for my sanity. It’s therapy for me. It’s obviously my livelihood, my mental health, it feels so good to me. It’s the most interesting thing to me, and it gives me a way to be in the world, to participate in it. Seeing things from my perspective as an artist, as a maker, is fundamental to my sense of self and to what I get out of life.
Ruby Sky Stiler: Long Pose will be on at the Alexander Gray Associates gallery in New York City, from November 7th to December 20th, 2025.
Interview by Ketlyn Araujo
All portraits and studio pictures Ruby Sky Stiler, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York
All installation views Installation view, Ruby Sky Stiler, Long Pose, Alexander Gray Associates, New York, 2025