Brie Ruais

Brie Ruais (b. 1982, Southern California) lives and works in Cerillos, NM. She received her MFA from Columbia University's School of the Arts in 2011. Ruais’ movement-based practice is legible through the scrapes, gouges, and gestures embedded in the surfaces and forms of the ceramic works.  Each sculpture is made with the equivalent of her body weight in clay, resulting in human-scale works that forge an intimacy with the viewer’s body. Through her immersive engagement with clay, Ruais’s work generates a physical and sensorial experience that explores a new dialogue between the  body and the earth.

Her work has been exhibited at public institutions including the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA; The Everson, Syracuse, NY; The Anderson Collection, Stanford University, Stanford, CA; Musée d’art de Joliette, Joliette, Québec, Canada; The Southern Utah Museum of Art, Cedar City, UT; the Katzen Center at American University, Washington, DC and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Her first institutional solo exhibition, Brie Ruais: Movement at the Edge of the Land, opened in June 2021 at The Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University in Houston, TX. Awards and residencies include The Virginia Groot Foundation Grant (2021), The Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant (2018), The Sharpe Walentas Studio Program (2018), Socrates Sculpture Park Fellowship (2014), among others. Ruais' work is in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Pennsylvania Academy of Art, Philadelphia, PA; TD Bank, US; Matamoros Art In Embassies Collection, Mexico; the Pizzuti Collection, OH; and the BurgerCollection Hong Kong. She is featured in Vitamin C: New Perspectives in Contemporary Art, Clay and Ceramics, published by Phaidon (2017).