Member Spotlight: Georgina Ruff
For our next NMC Member Spotlight JLS Gangwisch interviewed Georgina Ruff. Listen or read the conversation below:
JLS Gangwisch:
Would you tell us a little bit about yourself? Who are you and where are you currently located?
Georgina Ruff:
I’m currently located in Ashland, OR. Which is this teeny tiny town just about 19 miles off the California border. I ended up here for family reasons, I have a child, this is a great place to do that. I teach in Portland, which is at the other end of the state, about four hours up the I5. I work at PNCA, which is now part of Willamette University, so we’re an art school and we’ve been around since the early 20th century. We recently combined with Willamette University, so I am now a Willamette University assistant professor as well. I also teach at Portland State University, which is fun because I received one of my undergraduate degrees from there, so I’m returning. I ended up here after I received my graduate degree from the University of Illinois in Chicago and a fellowship that took me to Germany and then brought me back to the Bay Area where I taught it as SFAI (rest in peace) before ending up here.
JLS Gangwisch:
What sort of work do you do there, both in research and in teaching?
Georgina Ruff:
I am an art historian, so I am the art history professor that you have to take in art school. I teach everything from entry-level fresh people, focusing on vocabulary and large concepts all the way up through final year 300 level courses.
I’m a BFA thesis mentor when requested – it’s a request that I really appreciate and enjoy. I’ve also been a Masters thesis mentor for critical studies students at PNCA, I’m really honored when I’m asked to participate in that final concluding moment of somebody’s academic degree.
So I teach art history at usually 2 universities and then have other projects on various burners. I created an organization called MFA:NW, which I developed to contribute to the arts ecologies outside of the I5 corridor. For those who are not familiar with the Pacific Northwest, we have a few strong metropolitan areas: Portland and Seattle are the biggest, literally along the I-5. Then we have a large area with less connected schools and art ecologies that are scattered in such a way that community and connection is more challenging.
MFA programs in general can often be insular or “siloed” even within a metro areas – it’s an intense and introspective period for many people, which can make the transition after graduation challenging. After teaching at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, and visiting the amazing arts community in Pendleton (the opposite corner of our rectangular state) I developed a nonprofit organization to organize, present, and create conversation around a traveling exhibition of art by recent MFA graduates. The show travels to Pendleton and Eastern Oregon, we’re bringing it down here to Roseburg, we’re taking it out to the coast at Newport. It’s open to anyone who’s received an MFA degree in the last two years from a school in the Northwest. We have an amazing jury of artists, writers, curators, and educators, there’s a catalog planned to accompany the show, etcetera. So that’s my other main project right now, in addition to my responsibilities with New Media Caucus and some other things that come up here and there.
JLS Gangwisch:
Would you tell us what new media means to you?
Georgina Ruff:
One of my favorite aspects of teaching is the real-time synthesis of ideas that can happen in the classroom. It’s in this way that my definition of new media art has coherently formed, and evolved to describe artistic work or experiments made through the use of what is contemporaneously a new means. This was the most troubling of your questions for me, as I struggle to include rather than exclude from this nomenclature. Often when I talk to students in particular about new media art, we talk about technologically based art in which the technology has the potential to become obsolescent.
JLS Gangwisch:
What brought you to the new media caucus?
Georgina Ruff:
I wrote a dissertation about technologically based art, so I’ve been in the science, technology and art field for years. While I was researching/writing in Germany, a friend of mine who was then on the board of New Media Caucus asked me to copy edit some articles for Media N. Then at the last New York CAA I stopped into the “Artists and Hackers” podcast recording and found conversation and community with people whose interests are similar to my own. It was there that I thought, I can be of service to this organization with people who are working in some way tangentially to what I’m doing. I asked to join the board and then joined the Communications Committee.
JLS Gangwisch:
Do you have any other social media Instagram or X that you’d like to point us to?
Georgina Ruff:
My professional Instagram is @artvobject – I usually post a link to my articles and such on there. The MFA:NW website is www.mfanw.org and Instagram is @mfa_nw – everyone is warmly invited to follow along, spread the word, and see how that project evolves.
JLS Gangwisch:
Thank you so much for talking with us today.
Spotlight edited by Chelle Kreinsen.
