Today Ruth Owens’ paintings are fixtures of the New Orleans art world, where she is represented by the Ferrara Showman Gallery and has been selected as a featured artist in the upcoming Prospect.6 triennial. She is also a member of the artist collective The Front, which has an artist-led, nonprofit exhibition space that regularly hosts exhibitions and other innovative programming. But, her presence on the New Orleans art scene is relatively recent: Before getting her MFA at the University of New Orleans in 2018 and establishing herself as a successful artist, Owens spent twenty-five years working as a cosmetic surgeon.
Owens was born in Bavaria to a German mother and African-American father in the military. Impacted by her experience of growing up in Germany and sporadically returning to various parts of the United States when her father was transferred, Owens’ work often grapples with identity, and the physical as well as spiritual relationships between bodies and the natural world that surrounds them. Frequently making a Black or mixed-race figure the focal point of her paintings, Owens’ work considers the possibilities for creating “a spiritual Black ecology,” while considering the complicated and fraught relationship between Black individuals and nature.