Ru Marshall

Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York

ARTIST BIO

Ru Marshall (b. 1960) is a nonbinary visual artist and writer. They have painted and employed photographic processes on mirrored surfaces for over twenty-five years—vinyl, glass, fabric, and Dibond. These reflective images shift and change depending on the position of the viewer and the quality of the light, capturing the fleeting and interactive nature of perception and the natural and urban landscape seen in passing from car and train windows. In Marshall’s most recent work, they explore our compromised experience of nature in a time of environmental catastrophe. For the last seven years, they have been developing an improvisational dance practice and recently completed work on Interlope, dance/video project which took place in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, and which explored gender, the interaction between human and organic gestures, and our search for solace in a natural world we have failed to respect.

Marshall has had exhibitions of their visual work at Participant Inc., Triple Candie, The New Orlean Contemporary Arts Center, Thread Waxing Space, The Brooklyn Museum, Centro Cultural Rector Ricardo Rojas, The Drawing Center, Maryland Art Place, White Columns, and numerous other venues in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. They have received fellowships and residencies from Yaddo, MacDowell, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ragdale, The Banff Centre, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Marshall’s novel, A Separate Reality, a queer coming-of-age tale set in Phoenix, Arizona, was released by Carroll & Graf (2006) and nominated for a Lambda Book Award. American Trickster, their forthcoming biography of the faux anthropologist and cult leader Carlos Castaneda, will be released by Red Hen Press in 2026 and has been optioned for film/TV by Hybrid Cienma. They have twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize for their short fiction, appearing in N + 1 online, The Evergreen Review, The Barcelona Review, The Kenyon Review, Your Impossible Voice, Another Chicago Magazine, and numerous other publications. They attended the Rhode Island School of Design and graduated from Wesleyan University.

SPOTLIGHT

Play Video

CREDIT: A. Farm, Tra My Nguyen, Luke Schneider, Alec Phuoc Thuong

Performance, Presentation, & Discussion

by Ru Marshall and Lyon Nguyen

January 11, 2025, A. Farm in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

A. Farm presented “Performance, Presentation & Discussion,” featuring resident artist, gallery artist and writer Ru Marshall, and choreographer Lyon Nguyen, at Amanaki Saigon Boutique Hotel, Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, on January 11, 2025.  This event was part of Ru’s ongoing project-in-progress, Interlope. Inspired in part by Argentine philosopher and dancer Marie Bardet’s “The Cultivation of Gestures,” Interlope investigates the meaning of gesture in visual arts and dance. It also explored how movement-quotidian and artistic-is informed by our relationship to nature — in particular, trees. There was a brief performance by Lyon Nguyen and a presentation of Ru Marshall’s drawings (based partly on their collaboration with Nguyen), followed by a discussion between the two artists

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RU MARSHALL

RU MARSHALL

January – February, 2025
TRANSPACIFIC: LOVE DIFFERENCE September 3 – November 2, 2024 HANNAM, SEOUL

TRANSPACIFIC: LOVE DIFFERENCE

Sept 3 - Nov 2, 2024

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