Ruth Blackwell Rogers

has lived and painted in Randolph County, West Virginia, for over thirty years.   She received her BA in Studio Art from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College and her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  She has exhibited in more than three dozen solo shows and numerous group shows in museums, colleges, galleries and conferences in the U.S. and abroad.   "Why do I paint?  For the sheer joy of it.  To make visible what I see in my head. To nudge us into using all our faculties to see, perceive, understand. To record the life-force within and around everything. To contribute to the making-whole of the community. To put in physical form my gratitude and prayers for all beings.  Because it is what I know how to do." She has been a presenter or keynote speaker at a dozen social work, psychology, and art therapy conferences here and abroad.  Since 1992, she and her husband Hugh Rogers have toured her re-telling of the Hopi creation story, entitled “Four Worlds So Far,” in the form of a long scroll.  Rogers has taught English as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Korea, and art at Dana Hall School in Massachusetts.  She designed and helped build her studio and the family’s passive solar home.  Since the early 1990’s she has been involved in environmental activism.  She and her husband have three children and three grandchildren.