Reception | September 15 | 3:00 – 5:00 PM – Open to All

Ruth Simon McRae is an artist living in North Georgia who works in a wide range of mediums, including textile arts, painting, printmaking, mixed media, and ceramics. She experiments with materiality and layering by merging complex color combinations, pattern designs, and textures.

Her interest in textiles stems from a childhood surrounded by fabrics, from the fabrics in her father’s interior design studio to the fabulous clothes of the 1960s. She studied painting at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Philadelphia College of Art and received a B.S. in textiles at Philadelphia University and an M.S. from the Georgia Institute of Technology. These degrees provided her entrée into the field of industrial textile design, where she has enjoyed a long career in the floor covering industry.

A recent series of Judaic textiles combines McRae’s love of the practical and material with her spiritual life. She started with autobiographical themes; the landscape of her small rural Georgia town, the garden, studies in white to express a feeling of holiness, watercolor painting and more. From there she moved on to creating tallit and challah covers that were inspired by various materials and color combinations. Each piece was produced over a fairly long period of time, each was iterative, with one material or section added in response to the last, like a painting.

McRae continues this process in a series of artist books that allow the use of visual language to express memories, thoughts and emotion.

For questions, contact Marcie Blackman at mblackman@benderjccgw.org or (301) 348-3808. All Bender JCC programs are open to everyone. Contact Kate Falls, Director of Inclusion, at kfalls@benderjccgw.org or 301.348.3767 to discuss support and accommodations.