STATEMENT

Ruth Morgan founded Community Works West in 1997, an organization that combined her interest in working directly with people and communities impacted by incarceration and her commitment to social justice. At the same time, she has had a separate career as a photographer.  She has always used her art for social change and to give voice to marginalized communities. She created S.F. County Jail in the 1980s, after which she created her seminal set of photographs, San Quentin: Maximum Security. The latter, life-size photos, traveled to museums and galleries across the country and were useful in winning a case against the conditions in prisons. Morgan has exhibited across the country from San Quentin: Maximum Security series to Harlem Photos to the Welcome Home Project 2014 (with writer Micky Duxbury) to Ohlone Elders and Youth Speak and Piqua Shawnee: Cultural Survival in Their Homeland. 

Retired from Community Works, she has just completed Requiem: The Remains of the Day, August 4, 2021, Greenville, CA. The work premiered at the Richmond Art Center and will travel to the Montana Museum of Art in 2025 and the Fresno Museum of Art in 2026. 

Her work is in private collections and museums, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Houston Museum of Art, San Diego’s Museum of Photographic Arts, and the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive. She has received awards from several institutions, including Creative Work Fund, the California Arts Council, the San Francisco Arts Commission, and The National Endowment for the Arts. Recently the S.F. County Jail archive was purchased by the San Francisco Public Library and the Ohlone Elders and Youth Speak archive was purchased by the Bancroft Library.