News & Reviews
News
- Positano My Life: Massimo Capodanno, award winning photojournalist with ANSA, Italy’s national news agency, closely covered Ruta’s activity in Italy from 2007-2014. Tender, respectful portrait of a fellow artist.
- Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation: Oral historian Liza Zapol conducted interview in the studio at Westbeth, Spring 2016.
- Tablet Magazine: Holocaust historian Sara Wildman spoke to Ruta in studio spring 2015
- Casa Italiana, NYU: Professor Ara Merjian interviews Peter Ruta in February 2015, on the opening night of his show Italy Early and Late
- VA.gov: In 2014 Ruta donated several paintings to the VA Medical Center on 23rd Street in Manhattan. At installation of paintings, art historian Philip Gould identified Ruta as a “lyrical luminist.”
ART CART / Research Center for Arts & Culture: Video (@ 4:35) of Ruta painting in the studio, 2011. ART CART sends grad students from Columbia University Teachers College, to help older New York artists create digital archives of their work. For the prolific Ruta, a great boon.
Reviews
“In long views, Mr. Ruta’s method yields intoxicating results. Few painters in my experience so deftly render the close-packed spires of the skinny island’s grid…. depictions of sky and water are marvels of subtle observation…”
— Francis Morrone,
The New York Sun, 8/12/2004
- Leipziger Volkszeitung
- The New York Sun
- Art in America
- New York Times
- New Yorker
- Dresdener Neueste Nachrichten
- Albuquerque Journal
Links of Interest
Ruta’s father, Walther Franke-Ruta, was a novelist, satirist and in house dramatist for Radio Basel after the Second World War. He wrote some of the first radio plays heard in Europe in the early 1930s. During the Nazi occupation of Italy in late 1943 he and his wife, Else Stein, escaped from detention in the city of Lucca with the help of Italian Catholic and Communist underground. The Stein family of Offenburg, Germany lost over forty members under the Third Reich, including Ruta’s frail elderly aunt Thilde. http://www.berfrois.com/2014/04/suzanne-ruta-the-only-one-we-have-got/
Garance Franke-Ruta, the artist’s daughter, is a journalist in Washington DC. You can read her at yahoo.com. and on twitter.She was a founding member of ACT-UP New York and a presence in the 2012 documentary How to Survive a Plague. She wrote about the film for the Atlantic here: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/02/the-plague-years-in-film-and-memory/273449/