Home Artist Programs Supported Artists Ruby Chishti

Ruby Chishti

Brooklyn, New York

In The City Of Children is a sculptural textile work hung on the wall, in which many scraps and pieces of layered fabric form a larger-than-life child’s dress. On the surface of the dress, forms of houses and windows are visible.

In The City Of Children (Audiovisual)

2024

Stratigraphy Of Cloth is a mixed-media artwork composed from stacked and layered fabric and textured materials. The layers of materials in different colors come together to form a domed building on a dark background.

Stratigraphy Of Cloth

2023

All Her Calves Were Slaughtered is a sculpture depicting a kneeling figure embracing a reclining cow, their faces touching, both constructed from various textured and colored fabrics, displayed on a white pedestal.

All Her Calves Were Slaughtered

2022

An intangible Sanctuary Of Ocean And Stars II is a sculptural textile work resembling a hanging coat, composed of layered and frayed fabric pieces in earthy and muted tones, displayed against a white wall.

An intangible Sanctuary Of Ocean And Stars II

2018

Artworks shown are selected from works submitted by the artist in their grant or residency application. All works are copyright of the artist or artist’s estate.

About Ruby Chishti

Ruby Chishti smiles with her head tilted, wearing a sleeveless top and a black vest. She is a Pakistani-American woman with medium light skin, and short dark hair.

Ruby Chishti, born in 1963, is a Pakistani-American artist known for her sculpture and installation works. She received her formal education from the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan, and is now based in New York City. Chishti's art is characterized by haunting and enigmatic forms that explore the transformation of fabric from discarded mass-produced clothing into the reconstruction filaments of artistic imagination. She held the position of Critic in Residence at Cornell University, FSAD College of Human Ecology in Ithaca, NY. Her work has been exhibited at the Asia Society Museum, New York; the Queens Museum, Queens, NY; Rossi & Rossi, Hong Kong; Aicon Contemporary, New York; Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi; and Canvas Gallery, Karachi. Her major works have been acquired by Kiran Nadar Museum, in Delhi, and the Qatar Museum. Chishti's work has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, Art Asia Pacific, and Diacritics, and including in the books Unveiling the Visible and Memory-Metaphor-Mutations by Salima Hashmi and Yashodhara Dalmia; The Eye Still Seeks: Pakistani Contemporary Art by Salima Hashmi and Matand Khosla; A Companion to Textile Culture, ed. Dana Arnold and Jennifer Harris; and Threads of Globalization: Women, Textiles, and Fashion in Asia, ed. Melia Belli Bose.

Program Participation

Joan Mitchell Fellowship, 2024

Website / Social Links

“ My exploration revolves around the melding of found garments and social memory, intimately engaging with 'fashion detritus' to spark conversations about the passage of time and collective experiences of love, loss and being human. I dismantle unknown people's clothing, re-figure, and hand-sew layers creating evocative structures that prompt reflections on our emotional and physical connections to architecture, reminiscent of the sedimentation of history and the geological phenomena of ‘deep time' documented in layers of rocks deposited over billions of years.”