The Story of Ellis Ruley Grows at Slater Museum

It all began in 1984. Norwich Free Academy’s Slater Memorial Museum received what would be the first major acquisition of a work of art by Norwich artist Ellis Ruley. The tranquil scene, bequeathed from a private collection was referred to as Lions, but also took on a new title, Daydreaming. The work became a literal and metaphorical representation of Ruley, a black man who spent his life dreaming of a career as an artist, but denied by cultural and racial barriers. In spite of the challenges he faced, Ruley was a prolific painter, having created an untold amount of works during his over twenty-year career from the late 1930s to his untimely death in 1959. He was entirely self-taught and painted with rudimentary materials including house paint and poster board. The methods were crude, but the results were everlasting. 

After Ruley’s death and the subsequent burning of his family home, many works were destroyed. As of 2024, the remaining paintings are represented by private collections and museum collections across the United States including Slater Memorial Museum, the American Folk Art Museum, the Amistad Center for Art and Culture, RISD Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 2018, Slater Museum exhibited the largest retrospective of Ruley’s pieces, eighteen in total, coinciding with the dedication of Ruley’s former homestead on the east side of Norwich as a public park. As the story grew, so did Slater Museum’s goal of bringing Ellis Ruley further into the public spotlight. Forty years after the first acquisition of Daydreaming, Slater Museum’s collection of Ellis Ruley works has grown to six, and now stands as the largest museum collection of his pieces. A newly-installed exhibition in the museum’s permanent galleries was also unveiled in 2023, featuring all six paintings, as well as ephemera and artifacts recovered in an archeological dig from his home site.

The Ellis Ruley Collection at Slater Museum is the result of a decades-long plan to solidify the story of Ellis Ruley in the pantheon of American folk artists including names such as Bill Traylor, Clementine Hunter, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Nellie Mae Rowe, and many more. On September 17, 2024, the museum unveiled its latest acquisition, Ruley’s Rice Picking Time. The work is a notable standout amongst the rest of Ruley’s pieces – it’s among the only ones to depict black individuals. In this case, two Black women can be seen working in a rice paddy. The agrarian setting of a rice paddy is something that Ruley would not have seen as far north as Connecticut. This particular scene may have been inspired from something Ruley had seen either in a magazine, newspaper, or even another work of art as he was known to do. The painting features a layered technique he employed throughout many of his paintings, with the women at the foreground flanked by an almost mosaic-like cascade of trees and greenery. Important to Ruley were the connections between humans, animals and nature which became largely omnipresent in his paintings. The work itself shows a vivid social commentary on the lives of Black laborers, and the rice planting itself is replicated by other artists including Filipino artist Fernando Amorsolo whose famous works of Filipino rice planters have become nationally recognized symbols of Filipino culture.

Altogether, this work stands as a callback to the production of rice throughout the American South, produced by enslaved labor. Rice planting was both grueling and dangerous, and symbolized Black culture throughout the south as methods of growing rice were inspired from West Africa. Ruley’s love for the natural world, blended with his cultural roots as a descendant from enslaved parents creates a scene that is both rich and extraordinary.

Submitted by Dayne Rugh, Director of Slater Museum at Norwich Free Academy.