ABOUT THE ART

Ruth Morgan’s Percenda is part of a portfolio titled 10 x 10 Ten Women Ten Prints, produced in 1995 by the Berkeley Art Center and Alliance Graphics to celebrate International Women’s Day and seventy-five years of women’s suffrage. In this screenprint, an African American girl, with her arms crossed, stares boldly into the camera lens. The challenging attitude that the young girl projects, reflects a strategy adopted by an inner-city child to deal with poverty, social marginalization, and racism. For many children, the classroom often becomes their most stable environment, and here Morgan captures this student’s strong and confident face that masks her fragile hold on the future.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Ruth Morgan was born in New York City and received her BA in sociology at San Francisco State University. She has worked in arts programming with at-risk youth at San Francisco County Jail and treatment centers and with children of incarcerated parents in public schools. Her work within correctional facilities has influenced her art by motivating her desire to capture the psychological effects of imprisonment on camera.