K.Ruby Blume is an artist, activist, author, educator, farmer and maker. She leads an artful and art-filled life, dedicated to wonder and beauty.
Ruby has been working in clay since childhood. Her first ceramics teacher was Pier Volkous (daughter of Peter) at Studio One in Oakland in the 1970s. She studied ceramics and sculpture at San Francisco State University under David Kuraoka, Joe Hawley and Stephen Destaebler in the 1980s and was supported by Alan Meisel and Larry Henderson in the amazing ceramics studio at Laney College during the 1990s and early 2000s. She learned photography at the San Francisco Academy of Art and Zeichen Institute Tuebingen, warm glass with Dana Zed and advanced mosaic techniques at the Institute for Mosaic Art. She has maintained her own ceramic studio since 2006.
Ruby makes both functional and sculptural work and has experience with cone 10 reduction, Cone 6 oxidation, raku, pit and saggar firing. Her mugs, bowls, platters, tiles, table tops, mosaic and sculpture are cherished by a wide community.
Over the last 20 years she has worked primarily in cone 6 oxidation with majolica style glazes. Her functional work, “black‘n’blue-ware,” features a transluscent crackle copper glaze on a B-mix clay body, decorated with whimsical freehand brushwork and sgrafitto. Her Victorian-influenced, high-relief majolica art tiles celebrate nature and farming. She was proud to be commissioned to create a series of large format, high fire 8 x 12 tiles for permanent installation on the Fox Court Housing Project in downtown Oakland, CA.
As a generalist and prolific maker, Ruby has explored a wide range of media and expresses herself through collage, assemblage, mosaic, fiber arts, warm glass, photography, graphic design, printmaking, paper arts, bookmaking and water color. She loves making handcrafted goodies from things grown on her farm and has a dedicated following.
Ruby has been instrumental in instigating and leading several large scale projects. She was founder and co- artistic director of Wise Fool Puppet Intervention, a giant puppet theatre dedicated to social change (San Francisco, 1989-2007) and visual arts curator for 848 Community Space (San Francisco, 1990-1995). She was founder and headmistress of the Institute of Urban Homesteading, a homegrown school of urban agriculture and heirloom skills for adults (Oakland, 2008 - 2026 and currently also runs Faerie Road Farm, a 22 acre multi-use farm (Grants Pass, OR 2016-present). As part of these projects Ruby has taught hundreds of workshops and facilitated dozens of public events and festivals including In The Street Theatre Festival, PuppetLove! Festival of Radical Puppetry and Urban Farm Tours (2012-2019).
Ruby has published several popular books including the cult puppet building booklet Wise Fool Basics , Urban Homesteading Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living (Skyhorse 2011) for which she was the lead on design, illustration and photography and Everyday Cheesemaking (Microcosm 2013). She has been widely featured in print and digital periodicals for her work as a theatre artist, activist and as a leader in the Urban Homesteading movement. Google “K.Ruby Blume”
Always in pursuit of the most authentic expression of herself, Ruby is currently working towards her next iteration. She intends to spend the last third of her life in the studio in an explosion of artmaking.