Lisa Ruyter. Let us now Praise Famous Me

CONNERSMITH. is delighted to announce “Let us now Praise Famous Men,” an exhibition of new paintings by Lisa Ruyter. The show marks the first solo exhibition by this internationally renowned artist in her native city of Washington, DC.

In “Let us now Praise Famous Men,” Ruyter presents a new series of acrylic paintings that appropriate 1930-40s black and white photograph from the archive of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information in the Library of Congress. “These photographs are of Americans, and they represent those who go unnoticed, unrecognized and, um, unrepresented,” Ruyter explains. “They are us, or at least some idea that we have of ourselves, they belong to us because of the way that they came into our world, as photographs, not as people. It is a record of what was already being lost to Americans even as it was being constructed, an American dream of self-determination, independence and freedom.”