Ruth Fine (born 1941) is an American artist, printmaker, curator, and art historian whose distinguished career has made significant contributions to the study and presentation of modern and contemporary American art.
Fine received her BFA from the Philadelphia College of Art in 1962 and her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1964. After teaching studio art at the Philadelphia College of Art, Beaver College (now Arcadia University), and the University of Vermont, she began a four-decade career with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. From 1972 to 1980, she served as curator of the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection of prints and drawings at Alverthorpe Manor in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, before joining the National Gallery, where she became its first curator of modern prints and drawings and subsequently curator of special projects in modern art.
During her tenure at the National Gallery, Fine organized and co-organized numerous landmark exhibitions devoted to artists including Romare Bearden, Helen Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, John Marin, and Georgia O’Keeffe, as well as exhibitions exploring the work of important printmaking workshops. She also conceived and oversaw The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States, an unprecedented initiative that distributed 2,500 works of contemporary art to museums across the country.
Returning to Philadelphia, Fine continued her curatorial and scholarly work, organizing Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2015. The accompanying catalogue received the College Art Association’s Alfred H. Barr Award for Museum Scholarship. In 2023, she received the Archives of American Art’s Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History and the Print Center New York’s Award for Curatorial Practice. She currently chairs the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation and serves as a consultant to the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.
Alongside her influential curatorial career, Fine has maintained an active studio practice as a painter and printmaker. Her work encompasses etching, aquatint, screenprinting, and other printmaking techniques, as well as painting, drawing, and artist’s books. Frequently inspired by the natural world, her compositions transform observed forms and landscapes into imaginative, abstract visual environments. Her studio practice has been supported by residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Harvey Littleton Studios, the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Ireland.
