Spotlight Artist

Ruth L. Poor

MFA Annual
Artist profile photo
Featured in New American Paintings

Artist Statement


Lying through the fog and wild thickets of the rural Midwest landscape are isolated and zealot sectors of Christianity. Spiritual leaders in closed communities build proverbial arks containing traditions of hierarchy that create a culture of erasure and duty, all while hiding under the guise of biblical rhetoric. My collage work attempts to modernize biblical stories and rural cultural mythologies in a way that highlights forms of injustice or hierarchy. The subjects and mediums used to create my work are often symbolic and juxtaposed in the hopes that the viewer is able to re-code and re-imagine the separate collaged parts—paint, embroidery, and print—that create contemporary fictions.

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