Artist. Born Ruth Windmüller, her work with clay and bronze included large monumental sculptures and murals, also small-scale intimate pieces. She started her career as a stone mason in Britain in the 1930s, after leaving Nazi Germany. Turning to large-scale ceramics, she accepted a teaching appointment at the University of Chicago in 1964 and began creating monumental ceramic murals and bronze sculptures. Her most notable stoneware murals “Earth, Water and Sky” (1967) and “Clouds Over Lake Michigan” (1976), incorporated topographical swirls with abstractly rendered cloud patterns. Her small works pioneered ceramics with surrealist overtones, which stylized with Egyptian, Mexican and Cycladic art. In the 1970s, her largest scale work, “Clouds Over Lake Michigan”, was commissioned on the Chicago Board Options Exchange Building. Her major ceramic work “The Creation”, was commissioned by the Congregation Beth Israel in Hammond, Indiana and completed in 1983. In the 1990s, she completed monumental bronze sculptures for the campuses of Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Northeastern Illinois University and Lewis and Clark College in Godfrey, Illinois. In 2005, her art retrospective, “Ruth Duckworth: Modernist Sculptor”, opened at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, toured museums around the United States and was in exhibitions in Europe. (bio by: John “J-Cat” Griffith)