Ruth G. Waddy was an American artist, printmaker, activist, and editor, based in Los Los Angeles
Background
Willanna Ruth Gilliam was born in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1909, and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, daughter of John Moses Gilliam and Willie Anna Choran Gilliam. Her father worked as a waiter on the railroads. He died when Ruth was thirteen years old.
Education
She attended the University of Minnesota to train for teaching, but left school to work as a domestic servant in Chicago, to help support her family during the Depression.
Career
After the war she worked at a county hospital, where one of her co-workers was designer Noah Purifoy. Waddy was in her fifties when she turned to a career in art, especially as a linocut printmaker. In 1962, Waddy founded Art West Associated, to gather and support the community of African-American artists in Los Los Angeles
Also in 1966, her work was part of "The Negro in American Art," a traveling exhibition funded by the California Arts Commission.
Waddy embarked on a cross-country bus trip to gather works for Prints by American Negro Artists (1967), a project funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. With Samella Lewis she edited Black Artists on Art (1969 and 1971).
She was one of twelve African-American artists honored by the Los Angeles Bicentennial in 1981. Waddy died in 2003, age 94, in San Francisco, California.
Her papers are at the Amistad Research Center, Tulane University.
A sketchbook that once belonged to Waddy was featured in a 2013 family art workshop sponsored by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Los Angeles Public Library.