Ginny Ruffner


Ginny Ruffner is an American glass artist based in Seattle, Washington. She is known for her use of the flameworking technique. She also started painting on glass after seeing The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even , a glass painting by Marcel Duchamp.

Early life

Ruffner was born in 1952 in Atlanta, Georgia. Her father was an FBI agent, and her mother was a typing teacher.

Education

Ruffner studied at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, and Winthrop College in Rock Hill, South Carolina, before transferring to the University of Georgia, where she received a BFA in Drawing and Painting in 1974 and an MFA in Drawing and Painting in 1975. Following graduation, one of Ruffner's first jobs was creating glass animals while working as an apprentice lamp worker. In the early 1980s, she relocated to Seattle and taught at Pilchuck Glass School.

Career

Ruffner's first solo exhibition was at Georgia Tech Gallery in Atlanta in 1984, followed by solo and group exhibitions at museums such as the Corning Museum of Glass; High Art Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Museum of Arts and Design; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Glass; Museum of Northwest Art; and Toledo Museum of Art, among others.
Her work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Corning Museum of Glass, the Detroit Institute of Art and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art.
She was profiled on the NPR show Weekend America on March 18, 2006.
She was the subject of a documentary, Ginny Ruffer: A Not So Still Life, which won the Golden Space Needle Award - Best Documentary at the Seattle International Film Festival that year.

Personal life

In 1991, Ruffner was involved in a three-car collision that almost took her life. She was in a coma for five weeks. Doctors thought she would never walk or talk again. She was in the hospital for five months and in a wheelchair for five years. The accident left her with speech and mobility issues.