User:Toolongatfair

Ruth Jones b. 1928 d. 1993

Ruth Jones was born in Aurora, Colorado, the daughter of natives of New Orleans. Jones grew up in nearby Englewood, spending summers on a small farm in Missouri. She attended a one-room Lutheran grade school and graduated with honors from Englewood High School in 1946. In December of that year, at eighteen, she moved to Minneapolis to marry a G.I. she met in Denver. She lived in Minneapolis until her death in August 1993. In 1968, after her divorce in 1962, she married Will Jones, a columnist for the Minneapolis Tribune. She had two children during her first marriage. In the final decade of her life, she received formal training in art and established herself as a gifted print maker. Her strong, graphic images were wry, bawdy and usually political-minded. Always leftist leaning and usually feminist, her pieces were winking commentaries on the foibles and suffering of humanity. Although many of her prints were of animals, especially cats, they were obvious stand-ins for people. Jones often used mice and rats, or birds, to represent dominance and cruelty. In one print, her rendering of the Reagan administration and Supreme Court, Ronald Reagan is featured as a large rat at the center of the group, an enormous sheriff’s star-shaped badge hanging from his chest. In many of her pieces, as placid as they may seem at first glance, there is unmistakable familial pathos. Looking at her print titled “Sibling Rivalry,” one might see only cows at rest in a field, until one notices the sidelong glances being traded among them. When she showed her art, according to her professor William Roode, she withheld her most personal works. Her major solo show was held in Minneapolis in the 1980s at the historical landmark Pracna On Main, the oldest restaurant and saloon in the city opened in 1890. Jones’ show consisted of a collection of sixty prints of cats and was called, “The Artful Cat Event.” She drew her inspiration from a 1940's era label that had appeared on a wooden crate packed with Sunkist lemons, the "Tom Cat" brand. It was a resting but alert black cat with white front paws and a white-tipped tail wrapped around itself. Jones created her multitude of cats from a single engraving. Each image was entirely different as to colors, techniques, and mood. Ultimately, her cats bore no resemblance to the innocent Tom cat on the fruit crate label. According to one of her art professors at the University of Minnesota, the late William Roode, “She could draw, but it wasn’t her way of expressing herself. She was interested in everything but academic drawing. She thought in a more metaphorical way. She stored up all these images. She had this didactic thing going on—she had these stories that she worked from. They were rich with pathology or political commentary, [the work] was witty and funny, but it had its other side. All those animals became metaphors for people.” Jones enrolled as a freshman at the University of Minnesota on September 26, her fiftieth birthday. She dabbled with a major in Greek mythology, but soon settled on art. Within weeks, another of her professors recalled that the experience of having Jones in his class was akin to team-teaching. “It was almost like having a translator. She brought her experience into the class. Students gravitated to her because she had so much presence. So there was Ruth’s little outpost in the rear of the classroom, and if you wanted to find out something, you could come up front and ask me, or you could go in back and ask Ruth. She was especially supportive of students who were drawing on the spiritual and the emotional—the inner life—to make their art.” One of her most sophisticated works was her interpretation of the Greek gods Poseidon and his daughter Pasiphae, who was fated by her angry father to fall in love with a bull, producing the Minotaur. She inscribed the image using a plexiglass plate rather than a copper plate. In 1989, Jones received a diagnosis of a fatal cancer. She sold her printing press. In addition, one afternoon she threw out all of what remained of her work that she had stockpiled in her studio. What remains of Jones’ art is held privately or owned by her daughter. After her mother’s death, Jones’ daughter, a journalist, discovered works Jones had missed in the purge of 1989, all of which she used to illustrate a memoir of Jones.