VIP Hours (by invitation only): Wednesday, May 13, 10 am - 4 pm
Public Hours:
Wednesday, May 13, 4 - 7 pm
Thursday, May 14, 11 am - 7 pm
Friday, May 15, 11 am - 7 pm
Saturday, May 16, 11 am - 7 pm
Sunday, May 17, 11 am - 5 pm
Location: Starrett-Lehigh Building, 601 West 26th Street, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10001
Contact: caroline@voltzclarke.com | 917.292.6921
Press Release
Voltz Clarke Gallery is pleased to present Kidnapped on a Sunny Day by Ruth Owens at NADA New York 2026: NADA Projects.
As a plea of obsessive love for family and the natural world, “Kidnapped on a Sunny Day” offers an affective installation of paintings, recited poetry, and video enveloped in the floral softness of draped fabric. First shown at the Ohr O’Keefe Museum in Biloxi, this work visually presents an optimistic world of happy Black families living in reciprocity with the natural world. In contrast, the poem recounts Owens’ own abduction as a young child by her German grandmother in the form of a dark Grimm’s fairytale. The kidnapping was an attempt to prevent Owens and her mixed-race family from severing ties with the land of her birth and emigrating to their “shiny new” home in America. It was a fiercely passionate effort to keep Owens close to extended family and deeply connected to old-world environmental entanglement. This disjunction between what is seen and what is heard stages the artist’s ongoing reckoning with familial displacement, racial difference, and estrangement from the natural world.
Stepping inside the installation’s fabric structure feels like entering a forest; paintings and videos offer sightlines onto luminous clearings where folks fish, play, and engage with bodies of water, drawing on the artist’s childhood memories and her family’s Super‐8 home movies. The soft dreamlike palette in the background reflects the German folkloric motif as well as verdant imagery from the American South. Patterned borders of floral textiles extend each image outward, weaving together references to European fabric design and Nigerian batik to evoke a layered, diasporic landscape.
Ruth Owens is a figurative painter and video artist from the southern United States. Owens’ work preserves and contributes to the Black archive by creatively using personal super-8 film references from the 1960s. In 2024 she was selected to exhibit in the Prospect.6 Triennial in New Orleans and exhibited a solo show at the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art in Mississippi. Artist residencies include the Joan Mitchell Center, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Vermont Studio Center, the Studios at MASS MoCA and the International Studio and Curatorial Program in NY. Her work is in the permanent collections of the 21c Museums, Ackland Art Museum at UNC Chapel Hill, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Dale Center for the Study of War and Society, Beth Rudin DeWoody, Fidelity Investments Corporate Collection, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.
Selected Works
