Kady JLKR

The Tango series, created between 2009 and 2013, includes paintings, drawings, and multimedia works that focus on a weekly summer milonga held at twilight in Central Park. Each Saturday night, tango dancers gather around John Quincy Adams Ward’s 1872 statue of Shakespeare, offering a recurring scene that Ruttenberg returned to over many weeks and seasons. During these sessions, she created hundreds of preparatory drawings, watercolor studies, and video recordings.

Ruttenberg became especially attuned to the way the dancers moved through light and shadow as evening fell. This observation became the foundation for a new direction in her work. Projected video was introduced into the finished paintings, not as background documentation, but as an active visual element. The moving image functioned like a semi-transparent collage layered over the painting, combining motion and stillness in a single visual field. This approach marked a significant shift in Ruttenberg’s practice, initiating a phase in which video was no longer separate from painting but integrated directly into and around the large-scale compositions.

Tango was first exhibited as part of Ruttenberg’s 2013 show at the Museum of the City of New York. Visitors stood absorbed for the full ten-minute duration of the finished video-painting, which was accompanied by a soundtrack of classic tango recordings. Among them was a song performed by Ruttenberg’s late friend, the fashion designer Oscar de la Renta. The final segment of the video features Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man (1988), paired with footage of Ms. Columbia, the late Osvaldo Gomez of Queens, New York.

The public’s response to Tango affirmed what Ruttenberg had already begun to pursue: an exploration of how moving images and hand-painted elements can coexist within a single composition.