This two-hour walking tour of one of the Southland’s most innovative ecological farms is open to the public (non-members are welcome). Apricot Lane Farms was founded in 2011 by John and Molly Chester, and today spans 234 acres of countryside in Moorpark, California, just 40 miles north of Los Angeles. Apricot Lane Farms regeneratively grows more than 200 varieties of fruits and vegetables, and raises sheep, cows, pigs, chickens and ducks with care and respect, while working in harmony (or a comfortable level of disharmony) within our dynamic ecosystem. For more information about the farm and its working philosophy, visit their website: http://www.apricotlanefarms.com.

We will tour all aspects of the farm with staff. Open-air transportation will be provided for those who do not wish to walk. $35 per person (members)/$60 (non-members): Paid online at our website (under donation) www.ruskinartclub.org or by check to: Ruskin Art Club, 200 S Avenue 66, Los Angeles, CA 90042, earmarked Apricot Lane Tour. 

Saturday, Sept. 21, Annual Ruskin Lifetime Achievement Award (Ruskin Society of North America): 2024 recipient: Robert Hewison [Zoom], 11-12:30 [PDT]. Tributes from: Stuart Eagles, Dinah Birch, Howard Hull and Sarah Quill. Jim Spates, moderator.

Join us for tours of both Bulls Eye Studio and the nearby historic Judson Studios (established in 1897). Fifth-generation glassmaker David Judson will discuss his collaboration with James Jean of Bulls Eye Studio. Together they have created Pagoda, a profound synergy of artistic mastery and cutting-edge technology. This glass dome stands as a monumental achievement in contemporary art. The intricate glass elements are designed to interact with light, unveiling a spectrum of colors and textures that bring the piece to life.

The tour will begin at Bulls Eye Studio, where there is copious parking. The tour will conclude at the nearby Judson Studios.

Ruskin Art Club executive director Gabriel Meyer will reflect on practical applications of Ruskin's ideals to lifestyle choices in the 21st century. At the heart of these efforts is Ruskin's concept of "the sufficient life" -- a lifestyle of artful simplicity, mastery of life crafts, imagination, and ethically responsible consumption. Ruskin linked these values to the concept of the good life: "So the things to be desired for man in a healthy state are that he should not see dreams, but realities; that he should not destroy life, but save it; and that he should not be rich, but content."  Members of the Ruskin Art Club will be familiar with these ideas not only from Ruskin and Morris, and Thoreau for that matter, but from contemporary thinkers such as Wendell Berry and Paul Kingsnorth. Join us for this reflection and discussion on the promise and the challenge of translating Ruskin's values into practical reality, into the way we live.

Poet-journalist Gabriel Meyer is an award-winning foreign correspondent who has lived and worked throughout the Middle East, the Balkans, and East Africa. His reporter’s diary on the civil war in Sudan, War and Faith in Sudan (Eerdmans), won ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year award for essays in 2006. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in recognition of his work as a journalist by the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology at UC Berkeley in 2017 and by Lancaster University in the UK in 2022.  He has been involved with the historic Ruskin Art Club since 1998.

Described as combining ‘memoir, art criticism, and history to brilliant effect’ (The New York Times Book Review), Laura Cumming’s highly-acclaimed latest book, Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life & Sudden Death, transports her reader into the captivating world of 17th century Dutch paintings in the light of her own life and those of two painters: the Dutch master Carol Fabritius, artist of The Goldfinch and a mysteriously small handful of other paintings, and Cumming’s own father, the Scottish painter James Cumming. Both painters died suddenly, and both left works that have changed the author’s own life What art can be, and how it can shift your thinking in a thunderclap - this goes to the heart of Cumming’s talk for the Ruskin Art Club.

Laura Cumming has been chief art critic of The Observer since 1999. Previously, she was arts editor of The New Statesman (UK), literary editor of The Listener (UK), and deputy editor of Literary Review. She is a former columnist for The Herald (Scotland) and has contributed to the Evening Standard (London), The Guardian, L’Express, and Vogue. Her book The Vanishing Velazquez won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was a New York Times bestseller. Her memoir On Chapel Sands was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford and Costa Prizes. Thunderclap has just own the Writer’s Prize for Non-Fiction 2024. 

Andre Chaves was born in Brazil, far away from the worlds of Arts and Crafts and fine printing.  However, upon receiving a scholarship from the American Fields Service Exchange Student Program, he spent a year with a family in East Aurora, New York, home of the Roycrofters. Unfortunately, 1966 marked the nadir of interest in the Arts and Crafts movement, even in East Aurora. Returning to Brazil, he completed his medical studies; did his residency in Baltimore, Md., and on to Miami for a fellowship in hand surgery. He married Ann, a fellow East Aurora student from his high school days, and the couple eventually settled in Pasadena.

Contact with the Arts and Crafts movement took place gradually over the years -- a little Stickley here, a little Greene and Greene there -- but in the late 1980s, the couple bought the Duncan-Irwin House, designed by the Greene brothers, and went deeply into the Arts and Crafts world. During the decade that they lived there, Peter Hay, owner of Book Alley Bookshop, inspired the formation of a printing group, which stored a growing array of presses in the Chaves's garage. Clinker Press was born. The press continues to operate today, now located in Tualatin, Oregon, just south of Portland, with a focus on books and broadsides related to the Arts and Crafts movement.

Andre is a frequent lecturer on topics related to the history of printing and Arts and Crafts. He has lectured at the Arts and Crafts Conference in Asheville, North Carolina, at the Double Crown Club in London, and at the Alcuin Society in Canada. 

Join us for this year's Birthday Bash honoring the 205th anniversary of British art and social critic John Ruskin's birth in 1819. (The actual date is February 8.) The festive event will feature the screening of a portion of Robert Hewison's  film "All Great Art Is Praise" (2019) at the Royal Academy of Art in London, with actor Michael Palin reading excerpts from Ruskin's unfinished autobiography, Praeterita; the world-premiere of a work for cello and piano featuring cellist Allan Hon and pianist Alex Zhu; the annual toast to Mr. Ruskin -- and, of course, a party and reception following.

The event is free of charge and open to the public. Bring family and friends to this celebration of Ruskin in LA!

Telescope Studio is located at: 2125 Bay Street, Los Angeles 90021. Parking is available.

John Ruskin’s hostility towards Renaissance culture is well known. Denunciation of its pomp, scientism, and “enervated sensuality” gave moral urgency to the analysis of architecture in The Stones of Venice (1851-53), for instance, with its overwhelming narrative of social and spiritual decline. But when it came to the painting of Renaissance Italy, Ruskin found himself again and again of two minds. “Crushed to earth” by the achievements of several crucial artists—Tintoretto, Veronese, Titian (sometimes) in the 1840s and 50s; Botticelli, Carpaccio, and Bernardino Luini later in life—Ruskin couldn’t help but respond to their visionary force. This lecture explores key episodes in the critic’s developing conception of Renaissance painting: moments in which Ruskin had the courage to trust his own aesthetic responsiveness, despite the misgivings expressed in his historical accounts. It does so in the hope of opening up our understanding of Ruskin’s attentiveness to works of visual representation, as staged in his writings and drawings, and of how that exemplary attentiveness might continue to inform our own.

Jeremy Melius is a historian of modern art and criticism who has published widely on figures such as John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Pablo Picasso, and Lee Bontecou. He is completing a book entitled The Invention of Botticelli and at work on another concerning Ruskin and the historical study of art. Currently a NOMIS Fellow at eikones – Center for the Theory and History of the Image, University of Basel, in January 2024 he begins a new role as lecturer in History of Art at the University of York.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 AND SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 18 [OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, ON ZOOM] 9-10:30AM [PST]

“The Work of Iron in Nature, Art, and Policy” by John Ruskin will be the focus of two study sessions led by the distinguished author Philip Hoare.

Philip Hoare is an English writer, especially of history and biography. His most recent work, and the subject of last year’s RAC presentation by the author, is Albrecht Durer and the Whale: How Art Imagines Our World (2021).

Materials for Study Session:

"The Work of Iron in Nature, Art, and Policy"

Clive Wilmer's commentary on “The Work of Iron of Iron in Nature, Art, and Policy”

THE STORIES OF LA

Experience the diversity of stories that make Southern California such a place of discovery. At the Los Angeles Archives Bazaar, presented by L.A. as Subject and the USC Libraries, anyone with an interest in the region’s history will find something of value. A broad array of institutions and archives will have experts on hand to show off their collections and answer questions.

The Ruskin Art Club will have a table at the bazaar and club members will be happy to greet you. Historical treasures from our Special Collections Archive will be on display as well as fine press pamphlets for sale and memorabilia.

In a complex world THE ELEMENTS OF DRAWING, Ruskin’s lessons on how to draw, hold  valuable lessons about what it is to be human, engaging us with the natural world and principles of creativity that can help us live in a more connected way. This lecture explores how, in truly seeing stones and leaves and landscapes, we can find them reflected in the patterns of our own lives.

SARAH WOODS is an award-winning playwright and creative systems thinker. She’s founder of Artists In Exile, supporting artists to find refuge in the UK, a Visiting Researcher at the Centre for Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge and currently Fullbright Scholar in Residence at The University of Arkansas at Monticello.

Join us in person at the Denenberg Fine Arts 417 N San Vicente Blvd. Los Angeles 90048 or virtually!

This is an in person (open to the public) event that will be live streamed at Doheny Library, with a reception and exhibition of Ruskin Historical Documents in the Feuchtwanger Room (4pm).

Dinah Birch, CBE, is an English literary critic. Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University, she has edited two books on Ruskin, Ruskin and Gender (2002) and John Ruskin: Selected Writings (2004). Birch served as the general editor of the 2012 edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature (2012).

Ruskin’s writing on women was complex, and sometimes contradictory.  Something similar may be said of his far-reaching influence, both in his lifetime and since.  Women were a major presence in his life, and his closest associates and most devoted followers were female.  His contemporaries did not see him as a wholly masculine figure, though he claimed patriarchal authority in his roles as cultural critic or as the Master of the Guild of St George.  In the decades immediately succeeding his death, his legacy often inspired women’s growing ambitions to play an active part in public life, for Ruskin had always insisted that they had a right and a responsibility to work – noting, for instance, of Millais’s painting of Tennyson’s Mariana (1851) that if he had painted ‘Mariana at work in an unmoated grange, instead of idle in a moated one, it had been more to the point – whether of art or of life’.  But he defined women’s obligations in language that was offensive to later twentieth-century feminists, and this damaged his reputation. Recent interpretations of Ruskin’s continuing significance have explored the tensions within his gendered identity.  This lecture will reflect on the evolution of these debates, arguing that Ruskin’s rich and challenging thought, with its piercing critique of unregulated capitalism and environmental destruction, continues to have much to offer both men and women. 

Patrick owns a successful restoration and furniture making company Antique Refinishers in San Diego.  In 2000, he opened the American School of French Marquetry to share the expertise he gained in Paris at the Ecole Boulle with fellow American woodworkers. He has long been a champion of the artisan philosophy of David Pye.

In this thoroughly mechanized age, what is the point of craft? Does it make any sense to work with hand tools when machines can do the same job faster, and in many cases better? What visual richness do we lose by embracing a mass-produced world?" "The Nature and Art of Workmanship explores the meaning of skill and its relationship to design and manufacture. Cutting through a century of fuzzy thinking, David Pye proposes a new theory of making based on the concepts of 'workmanship of risk' and 'workmanship of certainty'.

This two-hour walking tour of one of the Southland’s most innovative ecological farms is open to the public (non-members are welcome). Apricot Lane Farms was founded in 2011 by John and Molly Chester, and today spans 234 acres of countryside in Moorpark, California, just 40 miles north of Los Angeles. Apricot Lane Farms regeneratively grows more than 200 varieties of fruits and vegetables, and raises sheep, cows, pigs, chickens and ducks with care and respect, while working in harmony (or a comfortable level of disharmony) within our dynamic ecosystem. For more information about the farm and its working philosophy, visit their website: http://www.apricotlanefarms.com.

We will tour all aspects of the farm with staff. Open-air transportation will be provided for those who do not wish to walk. $35 per person: Paid online at our website (under donation) www.ruskinartclub.org or by check to: Ruskin Art Club, 200 S Avenue 66, Los Angeles, CA 90042, earmarked Apricot Lane Tour. 

This event is a specially guided tour of the Autry Museum of the American West’s remarkable new state-of-the-art research library with its Ruskin Art Club/Hector Alliott Collection (1919) and its indigenous cultures of California holdings. The research library now houses the former Southwest Museum holdings. Space is very limited, so please reserve early at: info@ruskinartclub.org. 

The Autry Resources Center is located at 210 S Victory Blvd., Burbank 91502. Although affiliated, the library is NOT located at the Autry Museum of the American West facility near Griffith Park.

A historic house and library, built in 1926, in the West Adams district. One of LA’s gems, it houses Clark’s extensive collection of seventeenth and eighteenth-century English literature, one of the largest collections of Oscar Wilde manuscripts and memorabilia in the US, along with a specialty in fin-du-siecle literature, and fine press printing. Our field trip will include a tour of the house as well as a specially curated exhibition of Kelmscott press editions (William Morris), Wilde memorabilia, and fine press editions. 

The address is: 2520 Cimarron Street, Los Angeles 90018. Parking is available on site.

Please reserve your space at info@ruskinartclub.org. If you are not yet a member of the Ruskin Art Club and you would like to attend this event, consider joining or purchasing a gift membership for family and friends HERE.

In art and social critic John Ruskin's fifth volume of his Modern Painters, published in 1860, Ruskin identified "help" as "the highest and first law of the universe -- and the other name of life." In this wide-ranging lecture, writer Gabriel Meyer will examine Ruskin's "law of help" and its moral vision of connection, whereby the "intensity of life is also the intensity of helpfulness -- completeness of depending of each part upon all the rest"; the laws of death, separation, anarchy, and competition. He will reflect on the fascinating interface of Ruskin's ideas with contemporary scientific explorations of the "evolution of cooperation," which critique aspects of Darwinian thought. And he will suggest ways in which Ruskin's "law of help" challenges contemporary mores, with its focus on radical individualism and its attendant ills -- social isolation and growing polarization.  

Poet-journalist Gabriel Meyer is an award-winning foreign correspondent who has lived and worked throughout the Middle East, the Balkans, and East Africa. His reporter’s diary on the civil war in Sudan, War and Faith in Sudan (Eerdmans), won ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year award for essays in 2006. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in recognition of his work as a journalist by the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology at UC Berkeley in 2017 and by Lancaster University in the UK in 2022.  He had been involved with the historic Ruskin Art Club since 1998 and currently serves as its executive director. He has lectured widely on Ruskinian themes, most recently at the University of Arkansas at Monticello and at Notre Dame University where he delivered the second annual “Ruskin” lecture in February (2022), sponsored by the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values, on Ruskin and ecology. His essay “Ruskin and the California Dream” appears in the latest edition of the Ruskin Review (Lancaster University, UK). He is a Companion of the Guild of St. George. 

The Ruskin Society of North America and the Ruskin Art Club invite you to join us on Sunday, May 7, 12 noon-1:30pm [PDT] / 3:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m. [EDT]/ 8:00 p.m. - 9:30 p.m. [BST] (UK) for a VIRTUAL 80TH BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE TO PROF. JIM SPATES (Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Hobart/William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY).

Our dear friend and colleague, Jim Spates, recently celebrated his eightieth birthday and his many friends and colleagues around the world wish to salute one of our generation’s great Ruskin scholars. Join us by registering below to receive more information and the zoom link to the event.

The Ruskin & Morris Center of Osaka was founded in 2005 by Mr. Norio Tsuyuki. In the last five years, a group of volunteer members came together in the wake of the bicentennial of Ruskin’s birth, and we have been holding events related to Ruskin, mainly in Kyoto and Osaka, such as reading discussion sessions and a symposium to learn about Ruskin’s ideas.

In this virtual presentation, we will give an overview of Ruskin’s influence on Japanese art and culture. We will also introduce our center’s recent programs and activities. Finally, we will lead attendees on a virtual tour of the Ruskin & Morris Center of Osaka, where you will view the valuable Ruskin materials in our collection.

APRIL IS RUSKIN IN JAPAN MONTH AT THE RUSKIN ART CLUB

Two presentations this month will highlight the traditional craft aesthetics of Japan and John Ruskin's enduring influence on Japanese thinkers and artists today.

John Walker was born in Bloomington, Illinois in 1963.

He has degrees from University of Southern Maine (BA in Philosophy) and School for International Training (MA in Education), but was primarily educated by a life of travel. Hemmingway led him to Spain in 1984 and later, a wayward angel opened the door to a life and career Japan. In 1990, he began as a language teacher in Kyoto, then, in 1999, established an English school in the city’s northern ward. Enamored by Japanese culture, he began visiting temple markets in search, first of hand-woven bamboo baskets, and later, objects with spiritual significance. It was only a mater of time before he encountered the work of one of Japan’s most celebrated Buddhist poets, the artist, calligrapher, ceramicist, Otagaki Rengetsu (1791–1875). In 2004, he purchased his first scroll by Rengetsu. Over the last 19 years, has collected her ceramics, calligraphy and painting avidly, mounted a retrospective at the Nomura Art Museum of 2014, co-translated over 900 of her poems in English, and co-authored a book on her life and work: Otagaki Rengetsu – Poetry and Artwork from a Rustic Hut (2014) Amembo Press, Kyoto.

"More than 200 years after her birth in Kyoto, Rengentsu, whose name means "Lotus Moon," continues to inspire. The delicate moods of her poetry, the subtlety of her brush and the presence of her simply crafted objects feels sacred. This power to move the human heart rises neither from her talent nor training, but from sorrow. Rengentsu suffered a series of tragedies at an early age, yet found her way to a spiritual life of modest observations and communion with nature. Rengentsu's poems illuminate tiny vignettes of personal experience and the challenges of the human condition. In essence, they are about loss and how we may yet live in grace and wonder at with what remains and what shall come." -- John Walker

Dr. Kazuya Oyama: Lecturer & Assistant Professor of Literature at Doshisha University (2017-present).

A specialist in Japanese poetry of the Edo Period (1600-1867), specifically waka, the 5-line, 31 syllable poetic form (cousin of the haiku, the 3-line, 17 syllable form widely known in the West). He was the archivist for many years at Reizei House, the Japanese National Poetry Archive in Kyoto. He has written extensively on the poetry of early Edo emperors and the subject of the present symposium, Otagaki Rengetsu (1791-1875). He co-authored a monograph on the poet and artist (Otagaki Rengetsu: Poetry and Artwork from a Rustic Hut, 2014, Amembo Press, Kyoto. He has co-translated Rengetsu‘s entire poetic oeuvre of more than 900 poems into English. He has been a consultant to the national broadcaster of Japan (NHK) for their documentary films and books on Rengetsu.