[1] Neri is both a painter and a sculptor, and has worked with a wide array of materials including clay, plaster, bronze, steel, fiberglass, glaze, acrylic, oil, and spray paint.
The style that her father developed as a sculptor during the second generation of Bay Area Figuration also influenced Neri's work, which emerged later in her life as she made the switch from painting to sculpture.
[1] Comparing one of Neri's earlier figurative sculptures to the work that her father is best known for, a number of visual similarities are apparent and evoke the closeness of their relationship.
[1] Ruby stated in an interview that, “During undergrad at SFAI all my teachers were either my father's students or his contemporaries; I felt very limited by this but was unaware of it at the time”.
[7] They were gearing up to start their art careers at the “very cusp of the digital age”,[7] and with San Francisco's proximity to Silicon Valley they would go on to, “experience a culture-shattering dot-com technology boom/bust in the mid to late ‘90s”,[7] which brought with it a rampant case of gentrification.
[7] During Neri's time at SFAI, she formed her network of friends through a common interest in graffiti, which ultimately led to her inclusion in the Mission School movement.
[7] Although writing graffiti was more of a social and sometimes political outlet than a serious artistic pursuit for Neri, the influence of her time spent painting in the street is still visible in her work today.
Neri deftly combines elements of figuration, abstraction, graffiti, and folk art through clay, plaster, and paint to create complex, expressive and kinetic sculptures.
[10] In an interview conducted for Phaidon, the publishers of “Vitamin C”, she notes the various ceramic artists she was surrounded by and exposed to throughout her childhood, including Richard Shaw, Viola Frey, Peter Voulkos, and Robert Arneson, amongst others.