Sue Slick, Collection Information Specialist
We are broken-hearted that another of our collection artists has passed. Ginny Ruffner died in her Seattle home on January 20, 2025. Ginny was a much-loved star of the studio glass world and an accomplished public art maker, educator, and mentor to many. Our four Ruffner works are important elements of our studio glass collection. In fact, our Urnscape made by Ruffner in 1993 was one of the very first studio glass pieces added to our collection in 1997 when it was given to us by Ian and Mimi Rolland. Soon we will be celebrating the restoration and installation of Gene for the Sheen on Folds of Satin, 2006, our most recent Ruffner acquisition.
Ginny Martin Ruffner, American, 1952-2025. Urnscape. Flameworked glass & mixed-media, 1993. Gift of Ian and Mimi Rolland, 1997.19. Images courtesy of FWMoA.
Ginny Ruffner disliked being identified as a “glass artist” because it made it sound as if she was an artist made of glass. That statement also reveals that quintessential Ruffner predilection for wordplay and fun. She was many things in addition to glass artist – author, painter, public space designer, advocate, experimenter, and always a deep thinker. An optimistic explorer, she liked to say, “My future projects are always my most interesting ones”.
Ginny Ruffner left this earth way too soon, leaving behind many who adored and looked up to her. Comments on her Facebook page reflect the deep love, affection and respect her friends, fans and colleagues felt for her. She is described as being generous, prolific, resilient, inspirational, and, “a beautiful spitfire, genius angel”. She described herself as “an ornery cuss”, stubborn and bullheaded. She had to be all of these to endure and to accomplish all she did in her seventy-two years.
Ruffner was born in Atlanta in 1952 to an FBI agent father and a typing teacher mother, the first of their four kids. Raised in the South, in a variety of locales as her family moved often, she was the artistic one in her small South Carolina high school. She decided then that she was going to be an artist, “I had no idea what one was, but I wanted be one.” This supplanted the younger Ginny’s desire to become a librarian in order to have possession of all the books in the library. Undergraduate art studies took her to the University of Georgia, where she earned her B.F.A. and then completed her M.F.A. in painting and drawing in an astonishing single year. She graduated summa cum laude and, later, curious about her IQ, tested high enough to be admitted to MENSA and Intertel.
While wrapping up her graduate program she had an illuminating moment while studying Marcel Duchamp’s, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, also known as The Great Glass, 1915-1923, a large work of painted glass panels, its imagery constructed of oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire, and dust applied to the glass. It stands in natural light in the Philadelphia Museum of Art where the changing atmosphere through the day creates varying moods and effects. Ruffner had been thinking about introducing neon light into her paintings, wanting more illumination, but after her overwhelming encounter with Duchamp’s piece began to work with glass. “And I realized, oh, I won’t need to light my paintings. Light can come through my paintings. It was an incredibly evocative piece of art that involved mental processes.”
Layered glass panels with hard-edged clean lines and flat areas of color were featured in her M.F.A. thesis exhibit. Two of her 1975 thesis works were Equator and Atlantic, both were layered glass panels attached to large white panels and hung on the gallery walls. The production of these two-dimensional glass constructions had placed Ruffner on a self-teaching path with a medium that was not commonly taught in university art programs. Learning to work with glass independently was difficult, but it seems the practice of experimentation and trying new things began when she was young and was a lifelong endeavor for Ruffner. Clearly, learning to work with glass compelled her through the years following graduation. While in graduate school Ruffner, a self-identified over-achiever, had promised herself that she would always seek employment that required use of her artistic abilities, and she would always have an art studio because if she wasn’t using her studio the resulting guilt would be an impetus to make art. Another opportunity to work with glass and to use her art skills presented itself in the late 1970s when stained glass making was popular. Ruffner and a friend launched a small company making stained glass panels – hysterically bad, according to Ruffner. Then she stumbled across a glass shop in an Atlanta mall that made and sold decorative lampworked figures – another opportunity that she pursued with gusto. She gained experience in lampworking at Lillie Studios in Smyrna, Georgia and at the Fräbel Studios in Atlanta. After five years in these apprentice-like positions, Ruffner was a capable lampworker, who had also dabbled in glass engraving and a bit of glassblowing.
Ruffner began painting on glass in December 1984. She was also making what she described as “relatively small, pristine glass sculptures” at this time. In typical Ruffner fashion, she was also still working in other mediums, including neon and fabric. This resulted in her first installation, an exhibit titled The Seven Stations of Intimacy at the Fay Gold Gallery in Atlanta in 1985. Her accomplishments took her to Pilchuck in 1984 as an artist in residence where she was the first to teach lampworking and to introduce borosilicate glass to the program. Ruffner was also an early adopter in applying lampworking to serious studio glassmaking.
Ruffner, the first of her family to leave the South, moved to Seattle in 1985, a place she adored for its beauty and its support of the creative community. The move also coincided with her first elaborate narrative painted glass sculptures which emerged in November of 1985. Her process involved the application of acrylic, oil, dye, colored pencil, enamel and watercolor over the glass creating layers of imagery. The use of glass tubes and rods in her sculptures has been called analogous to her earlier two-dimensional work strongly based on the use of line where the glass rod becomes the line – the drawing becomes three-dimensional. Layers of meaning were built up in the applied media and the flameworked embellishments in glass. The meanings and messages in her work addressed her interests in nature, feminism, affairs of the heart, architecture and all of the topics that connected the dots in her exploration of life. As her work evolved, her personal vocabulary evolved as fish, flowers, wings, buildings, dice, colored pencils and a myriad of other visual symbols manifested themselves.
In 1991, Ruffner, now a celebrated American glass artist, made a prescient statement about her life and work, “For me, the only sin is wasting myself, rather that stretching or testing myself. . . Life is too short not to enjoy every minute of it. . . Some people wonder how I can make work that is happy when there is so much misery in the world, but that’s the very reason why it is necessary to make ebullient and celebratory work. I could beat people over the head with the awfulness of day-to-day reality, but life itself already does that. My role as an artist is to show an alternative.”
Brilliant, exuberant, and engaging, Ginny Ruffner was at the top of her game in December 1991 when she was nearly killed in a brutal car accident outside of Charlotte, North Carolina. She suffered severe head trauma and was in a coma for five weeks. Not expected to live, her parents and siblings were told to put her affairs in order. She had other plans. When she awoke, she was unable to walk or to speak. She had to relearn everything — her identity, her history. Even her dominant hand had shifted from left to right due to the severity of her injuries. She said, “My mind was like a big empty house that I used to live in, it’s familiar but it’s empty now”.
Her vision suffered as well, resulting in terrible double vision for years, but her other senses and her brain found ways to overcome these setbacks. Her motivation also propelled her healing; when a therapist tried to teach her enough skills to bag groceries, as if that was all she could hope for, fear of that end drove her to recover the creative aspects of her life that had been taken from her by the accident. She did. And when people reacted to her post-accident state and treated her as if she was “tetched” (her Southernism). She said, “I talk funny, I walk slowly, but so what? I’m still here and I’m still creating!” Her injuries required her to hire and direct a small team of assistants to carry out her instructions in the production of her work. She eventually was able to leave her wheelchair, but continued to rely on her dedicated team to help her produce her art.
Ruffner embodied optimism, positivity, curiosity. She said about the years following her accident and her drive to create, “Thinking about thinking, thinking about wonder has really kept me interested.”
Among her multitude of interests were genetics, particle physics, biodiversity, architecture, gravitational waves, black holes, hybridization, language in all of its esoteric forms, anything that grows, and most of all, nature. A friend described Ginny Ruffner as a force of nature, a label she would have embraced. She said we humans are nature, too. And of beauty, a constant theme in her work, she said, “When you surround yourself with beauty it heals you, it makes you want to give back to the world more beauty.” A statement from a 2021 exhibit reveals the persistence of Ruffner’s positive outlook into her later career.
The Rescuing Beauty of Optimism
Now we have the wonderful never-before opportunity to see a different kind of beauty. The beauty of adaptability, perseverance. The beauty of enduring with the creativity to see things in a whole new way. The beauty of moving forward, not going ‘back’ to the way life used to be. The beauty of optimism. There will always be beauty if you choose to see it.
But we always have that choice – embrace Now and to start to shape ‘what is’ into ‘what WILL be’ – or wallow and moan about what can’t be changed—no matter how loud the wailing.
What an amazing time in the history of humanity: We get to embrace a totally altered reality. Life doesn’t move backward, it moves forward. This exhibition is a call to do move forward with a different appreciation of beauty.
Ginny Ruffner 2020, There is Always Beauty, Habatat Galleries, Exhibition January 2021
In the last few years, Ruffner’s work bloomed into the world of virtual reality and augmented reality and the use of AI and automation in exhibitions and installations that included The Unperiodic Table, Poetic Hybrids, Reforestation of the Imagination, The Urban Garden and Project Aurora.
Her creative legacy can be traced through four decades in over 85 solo shows, hundreds of group shows, and representation in over 40 museums worldwide. She is also remembered for her roles in teaching and advising at Pilchuck Glass School, the award of the prestigious Washington State Governor’s Arts & Heritage Award in 2023, and the GAS Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019 for her artistic innovations in glass. An early member of GAS (Glass Art Society), she served as its board president from 1990-1991. She was the subject of an award-winning documentary, A Not so Still Life: The Ginny Ruffner Story, 2010 and a book, Why Not?: the Art of Ginny Ruffner, 1995. In 2016 Ruffner founded SOLA, Support for Old Lady Artists, to advocate for, encourage and help fund other women artists so that they could also achieve success as she had. Ruffner’s home, studio and exquisite garden in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood have been left to SOLA.
REFERENCES
Clearly Art: Pilchuck’s Glass Legacy, Whatcom Museum of History and Art, 1992, exhibition catalogue.
Ginny Ruffner, website. https://ginnyruffner.com/ .
Ginny Ruffner, Maurine Littleton Gallery, 1991, exhibition catalogue.
Ginny Ruffner, Maurine Littleton Gallery, 2003, exhibition catalogue.
Ginny Ruffner 2020, There is Always Beauty, Habatat Galleries, January 2021, exhibition catalogue. https://issuu.com/habatat/docs/ginnyruffner_singlepages .
Ginny Ruffner: a not so still life (video clip), Brainline: All about brain injury and PTSD, December 2, 2011. https://www.brainline.org/video/ginny-ruffner-not-so-still-life .
Ginny Ruffner: Aesthetic Engineering, Huntsville Museum of Art, 2014, organized by Peter Baldaia, exhibition catalogue.
Ginny Ruffner, renowned Seattle glass artist , dies at 72, The Seattle Times, January 23, 2025, Margo Vansynghel. https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/visual-arts/ginny-ruffner-renowned-seattle-glass-artist-dies-at-72/ .
GLASS Magazine, Spring, 1991, Unravelling Ruffner, Matthew Kangas.
In Memoriam: Ginny Ruffner, January 24, 2025, Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass, newsletter.
Out of the Fire: Contemporary Glass Artists and their Work, Chronicle Books, 1991, Bonnie Miller.
Remembering Ginny Ruffner, Museum of Glass, January 24, 2025. https://www.museumofglass.org/as-the-pipe-turns/2025/1/24/remembering-artist-ginny-ruffner .
Ruffner, Ginny (1952-2025), Sheila Farr, HistoryLink.org essay, November 17, 2015, update January 23, 2025. https://www.historylink.org/file/11143 .
Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Oral history interview with Ginny Ruffner, 2006 September 13-14, conducted by Mija Riedel. https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-ginny-ruffner-1355i .