CASEY RUBLE
Casey Ruble is continuing work on a long term project about an incredible woman named Eulalie Mandeville de Marigny. Ruble’s forthcoming experimental documentary, Eulalie, is a meditation on family, race, and a young nation’s struggle to define itself. The film will look at the life of Eulalie Mandeville de Marigny, an Afro-Creole woman, who was born in the 1770s to an enslaved mother and the largest white Creole landowner in Louisiana and who went on to become a successful entrepreneur and one of the wealthiest Black women in New Orleans. She once owned the property where PARSE NOLA was previously located.
Emancipated at age five by her grandfather for “the good services received from her mother” and for “the love and affection I have for one born in my household,” Eulalie was raised as a natural child of the white Mandeville family. She went on to become a highly successful entrepreneur, mothered seven children with her longtime white partner Eugène Macarty, and, after he died, won an 1846 court case against her in which Eugène’s relatives claimed that they were the rightful heirs of the couple’s estate. Shot in black and white and borrowing stylistically from the silent-film tradition, Eulalie will be broken into chapters on members of her family. These chapters will function as allegories for the nation as a whole, painting a portrait of a country marked by both trauma and strength.
Ruble was in residence at PARSE NOLA June 7 - July 5, 2019; August 1 - 25, 2018; January 8 - 18, 2018; and June 5 – July 8, 2017.
Casey Ruble is represented by Foley Gallery in New York City, where she has had three solo shows, the most recent of which was reviewed in the New York Times. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Smithsonian Museum (2016), New Jersey Council on the Humanities (2015), and New Jersey Council on the Arts (2013). An Artist in Residence at Fordham University, she has also written for Art in America magazine and curates the occasional show when inspiration strikes. She lived in NOLA in the 1990s and also from March 2020 to August 2021. She currently resides in Upper Black Eddy, PA.
The following are links to pieces by and about Casey Ruble:
http://pelicanbomb.com/art-review/2017/meeting-eulalie
http://www.artcenternj.org/exhibitions/exhibitions-archive/casey-ruble/casey-ruble-artwork/