AMSET presents the mixed media work of Christine Ruddy for the fall 2024 Café Arts exhibition. Originally from Ohio, Ruddy moved to Southeast Texas in 2018 after many years of visiting the Rio Grande Valley to assist injured Maquila workers in Reynosa, Mexico and to raise money for an orphanage in Piedras Negras, Mexico. She and her daughter started a non-profit organization called Partners for Responsible Trade Inc., which raised money to buy prosthetics, back braces, and wheelchairs for permanently injured factory workers.  After numerous trips to South Texas, she decided that she wanted to move to the area, so she bought a house and began to work remotely for a bank in Ohio.

Ruddy is a self-taught artist with a primary interest in photography that has since expanded to an interest in collage, mixed media and assemblage art. She began her photography journey through photojournalism, documenting protests and activism in Washington D.C. Later, she began still life photography, only for the practice to expand to include more conceptual image-making. Her interest in photography stems from a lifelong fascination with how a photograph can evoke strong memories and emotions, recalling a place in time or a person almost forgotten in the overlapping mosaic of our lives. She is inspired by surrealist visual artists, such as Dali and Kahlo, as well as the poetry of Mary Oliver and the writings of Bukowski, Ferlinghetti, and Cormac McCarthy. Ruddy believes that she can create new realities through her photography and art-making process.

The Stories We Tell includes collaged photos and images from the southern United States, with a heavy emphasis on the Rio Grande Valley and southern Louisiana. She hopes that when visitors see her work they will experience a feeling of sinking into the South Texas culture and geography – a place with an overwhelming aura of strong suns and big moons, sunflowers, cactus, exotic flowers and slow-moving trains.