From the Yankton Reservation to California, Ruby Jay traces their family history in final installation at Art Practice

May 16, 2023

By Sarah Fullerton

Each year, nine seniors in the Department of Art Practice are selected to receive an honors studio for their final semester. Each student receives their own studio space with 24/7 access. The studio space allows students to work on longer-term projects and explore new mediums alongside their cohort. Arts & Humanities had the opportunity to interview three of the nine students in this year's honors studios as they completed their final projects for Professor Stephanie Syjuco's Art + Archive class.

Ruby Jay works in painting and installation and is an honors studio recipient. They are graduating this Spring. All photos by Jen Siska.

Ruby Jay
Art Practice 23', Honors Studio Visit

Q: What brought you to Berkeley to study Art Practice? Did you always know you’d study art, or did you come to Berkeley as another major?

Ruby: In high school, I enjoyed painting and was always very much into art despite my school not having a very substantial arts focus. The teachers that I had in high school were great, there just weren't many of them and their time with students was limited. I didn't imagine myself as an artist. I always enjoyed art, but in the back of my mind, that wasn't something I could realistically pursue. Especially because growing up in Santa Cruz, a pretty affluent area, my family was always living paycheck to paycheck, and at times food- and housing-insecure. I always imagined I’d go to college and study something with a more direct track that would guarantee financial sustainability.

When it came time to apply to college, I had made up my mind that I’d study a pre-med track and I’d go for my MD. I distinctly remember having a conversation with a much more affluent friend, and she said to me “I would be so sad if I saw you at a reunion someday and you were a dermatologist or something because you have so much creative talent.” I just remember being perturbed by that because I felt at the time that it wasn't an option for me – it seemed out of touch with the reality of my life.

I grew up in a mixed household, with my dad being Chinese and white and my Mom being Native (Yankton Sioux, Ihaƞktoƞwaƞ Dakota) and white. My mom’s family is working class, and I’d be the first to finish a higher education degree on her side. On the other hand, my dad’s side of the family is mostly college educated, and he grew up with much more resources and high academic prospects. From that part of my family, it was very clear – you go to med school or law school, or maybe business school, and you make your money back, and you make your family proud. They were elated that I got into Johns Hopkins, and later deeply confused that I would turn the offer down. I decided to go to Berkeley instead and figured that I’d get to study a variety of things in tandem with cognitive science and my pre-med requirements. I immediately felt that I had made a huge mistake. I felt like I was drowning at this huge institution — I couldn't get into my CogSci classes, my financial aid was revoked for several months, I was placed in temporary housing, and I couldn't get an advisor to meet with me. It made me realize that I needed to advocate for myself a lot more than I was used to and find resources wherever I could.

During this tough time, all I wanted to do was take art classes — I missed creating things and working with my hands and I wasn't making time for it without the structure of a class, so I decided to major in Art Practice. I switched from CogSci to Psychology and continued working on that major, but my heart just wasn't into it.

Q: What has been a pivotal moment in your art practice since joining the department?

Ruby: After the COVID lockdown when I could attend classes in person, I was finally exposed to the reality that I could become a working artist — I met so many people who were doing it or were planning on doing it. I had never seen that before. I started taking a heavy load of studio classes — three a semester in my Junior and Senior year, I just was getting so much out of it.

Being at Berkeley, I’ve had access to so much knowledge that has been able to deeply inform my practice and that is where the richness comes in. Depending on what I’m working on, I feel my work has been really informed. I’ve been able to take ethnic studies, Native American studies, food-systems classes, and environmental science classes. Having the realization that I could really open up my practice to include all of these incredibly rich fields and philosophies helped me to think deeply about my work in a way that I never allowed myself to do.

The faculty in Art Practice are also just wonderful, beautiful people who encourage you to push yourself while simultaneously helping you to critique but also making sure you know it's possible. Brody Reiman has been really impactful on my practice — in the Fall I took her senior project class and she really urged me to apply for the Honors Studio program, made sure I had the proper application materials and just simply believed in me. To have this mentorship is priceless and something that was necessary for me to succeed.

Q: What have you been working on in your final year? What is your work and research centered around?

Ruby: I’ve really been researching and unpacking a lot of my family history and heritage on my mother’s side. Because of my various relationships with family members, it's been really challenging and also rewarding to go through the motions and emotions of gathering this information, while simultaneously navigating difficult relationship dynamics in real-time. The piece I’m currently working on involves wrapping an armature with scanned documents of my family's allotment paperwork. The allotment system was a method of assimilation and land seizure by the US government, in tandem with reservation systems. Working with it is incredibly convoluted and emotionally heavy. But my mother has been caring for this family history for a long time, and I felt it was finally time for me to understand it.

My mother’s father and his sister had inherited roughly 100 acres of land, mostly in and near the Yankton Reservation in South Dakota, with some parcels in Standing Rock. There are no utilities, water, maintained roads, or any infrastructure of any kind, just the land. While taking my senior project class, I was able to take a Native Studies course with faculty who researched the allotment system in the US. What I learned was that even the most skilled workers weren't able to survive on this land, which was the intention of the government, and there were subsequent starvations, famines, and reliance on US rations, thus forcing Native peoples to depend on the government who took away their land and families.

Because I was able to take these classes, I was able to piece together the probable history of how my family ended up in California from a South Dakota reservation. My great-grandmother was born on the reservation and while there is a three-year gap in her toddlerhood, she is eventually adopted by a white family in East Palo Alto of all places, which was the norm back then — you could purchase Native children in the newspaper.

Q: Your final class in your Honors Studio is Stephanie Syjuco’s Art + Archive class. How did this help you bring together your final piece?

Ruby: The theme of this class could not have been a more perfect match to the work I’d been getting into. I honestly didn't really even have time to take the Art + Archive class this final semester, but I literally could not leave Berkeley without taking a class with Stephanie. I’m so glad I did because it really pushed me in this final semester.

Once the semester started and I moved into my studio, I was still doing a lot of research and tracking down paperwork, letters, photos, and anything I could find to help me assemble this story. I would frequently meet with Stephanie and while the ideas were there, I wasn't getting a lot of traction around my final project. I wanted to know more! After trying many avenues of research — contacting people who knew relatives, etc. I started to work on my project.

Honestly, this piece came together very quickly. I decided to use the armature because — just like my understanding of my family's story, I can imagine it, but the full picture isn't there — it is a structured framework for a painting that isn't there and I like the idea of challenging the classical notion of painting. It also is a physical grid, which lends itself to the land divided by the allotment and reservation systems in the United States. In wrapping my family archival documents, I’m able to create a visual language and distorted narrative, playing with legibility and access to information, depending on where the viewer stands.

I often find myself returning to figurative and land abstraction, creating a sense of unease and violence that arises in the material and content in an attempt to challenge what is beautiful, what is repulsive, and what is uncomfortable, in an effort to provide an uneasiness rooted in aesthetics will disrupt the viewer’s relationship to a colonial canon.

Q: What is next for you after graduation?

Ruby: Until taking my studio classes, I don’t think I had ever conceived of a funded MFA program. Now that I know they exist, I do intend to think about pursuing my MFA. In the meantime, I’m enjoying my final moments with my incredibly supportive community in the studio cohort we’ve created and looking toward graduation. I’m okay with not knowing, for now.