artist list

Mom in Living Room 5 x 7 and Mom Looking Out 3 3/8 x 2 3/8

Artist Biography:

Kristi Ryba makes paintings, prints, books and stop motion animations using dolls. She began working as an artist in early childhood taking inspiration from the nineteen fifties television programs Ding Dong School and Captain Kangaroo for art projects to make at home with materials like Ivory Snow Flakes, shoeboxes, construction paper, scotch tape, paste, cotton balls, glitter, poster paint and tins of watercolors. Throughout the early years of her education, Ryba’s favorite classes were art and music. The daughter of a Presbyterian minister her family moved often throughout her childhood, and lived in small towns in California, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. After an early marriage Kristi expressed her creativity by sewing clothes and embroidery. Returning to school as an adult, Ryba completed her BA at the College of Charleston in 1988 and her MFA at Vermont College in Montpelier, Vermont in 2006.

Kristi Ryba

Charleston

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About the Work:

Highly influenced by ideas about girls and childhood play, Ryba uses dolls to serve as standardized human forms, to examine cultural roles, relationships and common experiences. Her interest lies in exploring the traditional gendered roles of women, principally motherhood and the domestic sphere. Not calculated in our economy as productive work, women's family labor continues to hold little status and is sentimentalized as a labor of love. Drawing ideas from personal experience and cultural influences, Ryba’s focus is to question and explore how in our society these gendered roles known as ‘women’s work,’ have become and remain trivialized and of no or low economic value.