(L.A. in N.Y.) Manuel Neri and Ruby Neri at Salon 94

Ghosts (2025), for instance, is about three feet tall and decorated with colorfully cartoonish repeating motifs and shapes. Two bulbous yellow and orange flowers sit at its top, and below them are a ring of yellow-eyed ghostlike figures. The ghost’s black drawn-on lips smile behind and above a ring of women, all in brightly colored skirts, topless, their booted feet pointing outwards spunkily. Like all of Ruby’s current work, the piece embraces a bawdy, spirited fullness. Its playful spray-paint-like glaze and circle of women tell a story of interconnected generations growing, dying, living.

In January of 2025, along with many other artists in L.A., Ruby lost her home to the Eaton Canyon fire. In the Salon 94 exhibit, in another three-foot-tall ceramic sculpture, a figure lounges nude with a matchstick in her lips. From her mouth, she blows billows of colorful smoke. A group of smaller women stand below her, enduring the weight of the reclining smoking figure, who appears to be a deity. The work, Let The Unknown Pass Over (2026), alludes to the grit and soul demanded to survive life’s chaos and perhaps the community that supports us when we do. While Manuel Neri’s “virile swagger” may rightly strike some as out of step with our time, as his sculptures contain an element of gendered displacement, Ruby has inherited her father’s figurative tradition. But crucially, she translates a different narrative energy into her objects, imbuing them with her own vital life force, portraying a fuller version of the female experience.