Twilight in the Garden of Hope: Nature as Inspiration

About our topic

The path to discovering my favorite medium which is clay has also bought me to putting my roots in the soil. Spiritually I find I am deeper into the woods as I explore my passion of wildlife habitats, both plant and animal. I have become increasingly involved in learning about conservation which feeds the direction of my work . My ideas for sculptures blow around the mountain where I live as I walk through the woods with my head full of inspiration.

About the speaker

Kathy Ruttenberg is an accomplished, acclaimed multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, painting, and animation. Her fantastical humanistic and nature installations have been displayed on Broadway in New York City, and are permanently installed in the Tisch Children's Zoo in New York's Central Park and Battery Park and in the Mamiraua Sustainable Development Reserve in Amazonas, Brazil. Her work has been exhibited at venues throughout the world including Stefan Stux Gallery, New York; Sladmore Contemporary, London; the Dubuque Museum of Art, Iowa; the Caramoor Center for Music and Art, New York; the International Ceramic Biennial, France; the 5th World Ceramic Biennale Korea; and the 59th Faenza Prize International Competition of Contemporary Ceramic Art, Italy. She and her work have been featured in media, newspapers and publications, including the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, The Boston Globe, the Independent, Artpress, NY Post, and the television news magazine CBS Sunday Morning.

In the artist's engagingly odd arrangements, a cast of human, animal, and floral characters have strange encounters and sometimes even merge. Just as Ruttenberg's art works have infiltrated far-flung corners of the globe, the stories they weave infiltrate hidden corners of the viewer's mind, brightening it with color, shading it with psychic mysteries, and taking temporary hold of our thoughts.

Emerging from New York's early 1980s East Village art scene, her allegorical paintings contributed to the vitality of the new figurative expressionism of the era. Over the last four decades her work has gradually shifted from painting towards an emphasis on sculpture. Oscillating between the intimate to the monumental, she uses ceramic, bronze, and light to explore themes of ecofeminism, animal liberation, and sexuality. Kathy Ruttenberg (b. 1957, Chicago, IL) lives and works in Upstate New York.

Explore her work here.

Natural Habitat Evanston, a program of Climate Action Evanston, is an all-volunteer community group of about 900 members, spreading the word on creating habitat for insects, birds, and other wildlife. We aim to change the culture of lawns: leaving your leaves is the simplest first step; the second step is adding a native shrub or tree to shrink your lawn. We show how to transition from turf with low-cost cardboard methods, which keystone native plants to choose for year-round forage, that insects chewing on leaves is a ‘win’ (rather than cause to reach for pesticide), how turning off unnecessary lights saves insect and birds (and human health), and how to make your windows bird-friendly (because if you are going to invite birds to your yard, let them visit safely). We plant a lot of native trees and shrubs, especially at schools and in the 5th Ward.

We encourage people to think outside the lawn with No Mow May. Our Pollinator Pledge is a central focus of all our outreach and education, and a great way to spread the word to your neighbors.

We encourage people to think outside the lawn with No Mow May. Our Pollinator Pledge is a central focus of all our outreach and education, and a great way to spread the word to your neighbors.