Ruth Fine

Ruth Fine was born in Philadelphia. After 30 years in Washington as a curator at the National Gallery of Art (NGA), she returned to her home city in 2010. At the NGA she conceived and oversaw the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States distribution project. Also, at the NGA and for several other institutions, she has organized dozens of exhibitions of 19th- through 21st-century artists including Romare Bearden, Mel Bochner, Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Gilliam, Jasper Johns, Norman Lewis, Roy Lichtenstein, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe, Martin Puryear and, most recently, Frank Stewart for Harvard University. She has, in addition, organized exhibitions for the Crown Point Press; Gemini G.E.L.; and Graphicstudio, the University of South Florida printmaking workshops. 

She has written for many catalogs and anthologies, including the primary essay for the exhibition catalog Luscious: Paintings and Drawing by Wendy Edwards, presented by Brown University in 2019. The catalog for Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis, an exhibition she curated for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, was awarded the College Art Association Alfred H. Barr Award for Museum Scholarship in 2017, the same year she received Brandywine Workshop's Lifetime Achievement Award.

Fine earned her BFA from Philadelphia College of Art (PCA, now the University of the Arts) and her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. Before becoming a curator, she taught drawing, painting, design, and printmaking at PCA, Beaver College (now Arcadia University), and the University of Vermont. Fine works primarily on paper now, making collages, prints in diverse media, drawings, watercolors, and unique and editioned artists' books.

She chairs the board of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation and serves as an Honorary Advisor of Aspen Institute's Artists Endowed Foundation Initiative.

Fine has been a friend of Brandywine Workshop and Archives since its founding. She contributed the essay "Education as Activism: Conversation in Print" to the exhibition catalog for Full Spectrum: Prints from the Brandywine Workshop at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
_{—From Brandywine Workshop and Archives records}