Biography
Casey Ruble is an Artist in Residence at Fordham University, New York, where she teaches painting and drawing and curates shows for the university galleries. She is represented by Foley Gallery in New York. Ruble’s work and curatorial projects have been reviewed in publications including the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, Sculpture Magazine, and Kolaj Magazine. She has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts (2019, 2013), PARSEnola (2017–2019), the Warhol Foundation (through PARSEnola, 2018), the Smithsonian Institution (2016), and the New Jersey Council for the Humanities (2015). She resides in New Jersey in a village overlooking the Delaware River.
Research
Eulalie
A meditation on the meaning of family, race, and a young nation’s struggle to define itself, the experimental documentary film Eulalie looks at the life of Eulalie Mandeville, an Afro-Creole woman born in the 1770s to an enslaved mother and the wealthiest white Creole landowner in Louisiana. 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, mother seven children with her longtime white partner Eugène Macarty, and, after he died, win an 1848 court case against her in which Eugène’s relatives claimed they were the rightful heirs to the couple’s estate. Borrowing stylistically from the silent-film tradition, Eulalie will consist exclusively of present-day, black-and-white shots of locations of significance to her story, interspersed with title cards that tell her story in a series of chapters on members of her family and the 1848 court case. These chapters will function as allegories for the nation as a whole, sketching a portrait of a country marked by both trauma and strength.
