Remembering Artist Ginny Ruffner: A Charismatic Original Thinker

On January 20, 2025, the artist Ginny Ruffner died, for the second time.

It took death two tries to finish her. The first untimely event happened after a head-on car collision in 1991, in North Carolina, where she had gone to attend her brother’s wedding and spend the Christmas holiday with her family. She didn’t stay dead for long, thanks to the arrival of emergency medical techs who resuscitated her and got her to a hospital where she remained in a coma for two months before defying everyone’s expectations by waking up, learning to talk and walk again, and eventually resuming an incredibly full and creative life for 34 more years through sheer force of will. She was proud of her tracheotomy scar. She called it her trauma tattoo.

If you don’t know who Ginny Ruffner was, don’t worry. It’s easy to catch up on that. Her life, extraordinary talent, inspiring accomplishments, and pure grit are well and widely documented. There’s Sheila Farr’s definitive essay about her on HistoryLink , and Margo Vansynghel wrote an excellent obituary in the Seattle Times.

The feature-length documentary about Ginny, A Not So Still Life, directed by Karen Stanton, is now available to stream free online, courtesy of its producer, David Skinner of ShadowCatcher Entertainment. And if you’re interested in taking a deep dive into her extraordinary work—the subject that interested Ginny much more than her personal story did—the best place to start is https://ginnyruffner.com/, a site created by her friend and colleague, Michael Hilliard.

Although her star was already well on the rise before the debilitating accident, I don’t think anyone who knew her imagined that two more incredibly productive decades of lay ahead of her. It turns out that our collective imagination was not as expansive as hers. But that’s always been the case.

I met Ginny in 1985 at a birthday party. Although there were several interesting and accomplished people there, she immediately captured my attention. My husband had the same reaction, and I don’t blame him. She was a babe. As our friendship deepened, I discovered that she was not only one of the most beautiful people I have ever known, but one of the smartest, funniest, and most magnetic. She was also one of the most original thinkers. And then there was her charisma.

People were drawn to Ginny almost without realizing it, as if they were hypnotized by her, which they probably were. In 2003, my family and I traveled with her to England to attend a three-day celebration of the 60^th birthday of our friend Bela, a dashing Hungarian mathematician who is a fellow at Trinity College in Cambridge. In an environment virtually teeming with important and impressive people, Ginny became the center of attention. Everyone vied to please her and talk to her and do things for her. Partly because of her mobility issues, but mostly because of her charm, she was given Stephen Hawking’s college rooms as her accommodations for the duration of her stay. Zooming around the college and the city on her Segway— a gift from its inventor Dean Kamen—she was followed by a stream of adorable undergraduate and graduate engineers and junior geniuses who were initially attracted by her new and unusual mode of transportation but quickly fell under her personal spell.

But before attending the party in Cambridge, my husband, two daughters, Ginny and I hopped over to Paris to spend a few days eating, shopping, wandering around, and visiting museums. My family stayed with a Seattle friend whose apartment on the Rive Droite was one of four smaller (relatively speaking) spaces that had been carved out of a much larger residence, so it boasted a small ballroom where Charlie and I slept on a Costco inflatable mattress that we brought with us because our girls had claimed the only spare bedroom.

Ginny stayed at the Jeu de Paume, an elegant little hotel that had been Louis XIII’s tennis court back in the day. Even after the bouncing around her brain endured in the accident, Ginny’s mind was quick, agile, restless, and full of wordplay, always looking for connections that others didn’t see. On our second day in Paris, she asked if I had figured out the common denominator between Suzanne’s apartment and her hotel.

“I have no idea,” I said.

“Balls.” she replied.

She had plenty of opinions and wasn’t afraid to express them, always under the right circumstances and almost always modified by her sense of tact and Southern upbringing. We amused ourselves in restaurants and museums testing our theory that there were two surefire ways to irritate a Parisian. One was not trying to speak French; the other was trying to speak French.

On the third day of our visit we were crossing the street when Ginny’s Segway, confused by the ancient and asymmetrical curbs of Paris, tilted suddenly and tossed her to the ground. She landed hard, on her butt, on those unforgiving cobblestones, with the wind knocked completely out of her. This fiasco immediately attracted a bunch of normally aloof Parisians, who were now expressing concern offering help in excellent English and asking my husband if he would like them to call an ambulance. After she regained her breath, Ginny insisted she was fine. Knowing her, we knew that was the final word, so we thanked everyone for their kindness and the small crowd of Samaritans dispersed.

Charlie helped her back to her feet and back onto the same electronic horse that had just bucked her off. As she rolled away, she rolled her eyes in the direction of the departing Parisians, and muttered, “I guess they do understand English, but only in case of an emergency.”

She spent the next day at her hotel lying in bed (something she hated doing) and popping nothing stronger than aspirin for the pain. The day after that, we all flew to Cambridge for the birthday party where Ginny carried on as if nothing had happened. At one of the many ensuing dinners and garden parties, she and I were chatting with one of the dashing and brilliant postdocs—actually, she was chatting and expertly flirting; I was trying to sleep standing up. As I leaned against a convenient willow tree, bleary-eyed and blank, it occurred to me that this woman who was not quite a year younger, would definitely outlive me. I was wrong.

Maybe I’m biased, because I’m a compulsive storyteller, but I believe that stories are the essence of life. They are what matters most because they are all that endures of a person once they’re gone. Ginny believed in stories too. Her art was visual but also unabashedly narrative. The titles she gave her creations were as much a part of their essence as the paint, glass, metal and pixels they were built from. There are far too many titles to list, but they include: Wine Triangulation, One Way to Birth a Gravitational Wave, Recognition Is Not Comprehension, Extreme Pollinators, What Happens When You Squeeze a Goldfish, and Celebration Requires Ornamentation or The History of the Party Bow.

She did not suffer mediocrity, especially in artists of any kind, from writers and painters to sculptors and architects. The accident that nearly ended her life left her with impaired speech, a problem she conquered with sheer force of will. But sometimes it was difficult to understand what she was saying, even for people who were hanging on every word. During one of her talks at the Museum of the Desert, a dashing white-haired man sitting next to me leaned over and whispered, “She said there’s a special place in hell for who?”

“Architects,” I whispered back. “She said there’s a special place in hell for architects.”

“Oh,” he replied, his eyebrows shooting up in surprise.

Maybe he was an architect. But it didn’t matter, because of course Ginny didn’t hate architects. Several of her friends were talented and celebrated architects. She used that “special place in hell” phrase often to describe any discipline whenever its practitioners didn’t measure up to the same high standards that she held herself to. What she hated was laziness, mediocrity and indifference, which she considered crimes against beauty. Beauty was her goddess, the only higher power she served or believed in.

People who have died and come back are fascinating. We’re dying (sorry) to know if they picked up any interesting information while they were out there, and she was often asked about it. But Ginny was sanguine about death because, having talked it into a standoff, she had moved on, turning her attention more interesting and daunting enigmas. “Been there, done that,” she liked to say whenever the topic of that great mystery came up. And when anyone asked if she thought there was another existence beyond this one on earth, she’d answer with sly insouciance, “As far as I’m concerned, that’s none of my business.”