RUBY Projects is pleased to present The Gospel in Brief, curated by Dr. Charles Moore, on view at La Ruche HTX. Bringing together new and recent works by Crystal Yara Anthony, Jessica Vollrath, Monica Ikegwu, and Kimberly Klauss, the exhibition reflects on faith, love, doubt, and moral responsibility through painting and portraiture.
The title The Gospel in Brief is drawn from Leo Tolstoy’s 1892 text, in which the author distilled the teachings of Jesus into a radical call toward simplicity, compassion, and action. In this spirit, the exhibition examines how conviction and uncertainty coexist, and how belief manifests not through doctrine but through lived experience.
Each artist approaches the human condition as both subject and mirror—revealing the quiet tension between internal faith and external form. Anthony’s works evoke intimacy and reflection; Vollrath’s compositions explore the fragility of perception; Ikegwu’s portraits render presence as moral inquiry; and Klauss’s paintings gesture toward transcendence through restraint.
Curated by LaRucheHTX Curator In Residence, Dr. Charles Moore, The Gospel in Brief echoes Tolstoy’s vision of ethics as a practice of love and empathy. The exhibition invites viewers to consider faith not as adherence, but as embodiment—to live, rather than merely profess, the truths we seek.
On view October 30 – December 13, 2025, at La Ruche HTX (1705 Ewing Street, Houston).
Opening reception Thursday, October 30, 6–8 PM.
Curator-In-Residence: Dr. Charles Moore
Dr. Charles Moore is an art historian, writer, and curator based in New York and the author of The Black Market: A Guide to Art Collecting and The Brilliance of the Color Black through the Eyes of Art Collectors.
His exhibitions address themes of social justice, color theory, and abstract expressionism. He recently received his Doctorate from Columbia University Teachers College, researching the life and work of abstract painter Ed Clark. Moore is the winner of Harvard University’s Titus & Venus Legacy Award, the recipient of the Artis Curatorial Residency, a 2022 Tracksmith Artist Fellowship, and has participated in numerous international writing residencies. His books have been translated into more than ten languages.
Curatorial Statement
The human condition, especially when it comes to reconciling the meaning of our lives, has become distorted, manipulated, and convoluted. Inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s “The Gospel in Brief,” this exhibition strips away the ornamentation of doctrine, offering raw, immediate encounters with faith, doubt, love, and moral responsibility to illuminate a more pure, distilled pursuit of understanding of the human condition. Through singular yet interconnected stories, the exhibition illuminates our own place in the tension between belief and uncertainty, simplicity and complexity, individuality and collective experience.
The four artists of the exhibition continue Tolstoy’s vision of uncovering an unembellished truth. Their individual stories share a universal message, one that spoke not through miracle or mystery but through action, ethics, and love. This exhibition mirrors that impulse, presenting works that engage with the universal search for meaning. In each piece, a singular narrative unfolds, a lone voice grappling with faith, identity, suffering, or transcendence. Each artist’s journey, however, resonates beyond themselves, asking, what is the essence of a life well lived? How do we reconcile the weight of existence with the pull of the divine?
To uncover his findings, Tolstoy stripped down the teachings of Jesus he found in the New Testament down to their most essential elements. He dismantled layers of institutionalized religion to reveal a core of radical simplicity. Likewise, the works in this exhibition pare down the human experience to its fundamental truths: struggle, redemption, humility, and love. Whether through their gestures, stark materiality, or deeply personal storytelling, these works resist excess, embracing the quiet clarity of what is essential. In the act of reduction, new dimensions emerge that showcase the transcendent within the mundane.
Though each artist presents an individual story, together they form a collective meditation on Tolstoy’s belief in the interconnectedness of all human experience. Fragments of disparate lives weave into a larger tapestry, one that underscores our shared longing for understanding and moral clarity. The exhibition’s structure mirrors the way “The Gospel in Brief” unites the first four accounts of the New Testament into a singular voice, emphasizing the power of perspective while affirming the fundamental oneness of human existence.
In this oneness, the artists come together to grapple with faith, doubt, and transformation. Tolstoy’s reinterpretation of scripture did not seek to comfort but to challenge. Faith, in his view, was not blind adherence but a lived, questioned, and continually evolving practice. This exhibition embraces that tension, presenting works that embody both certainty and ambiguity. Some pieces confront the crisis of belief; others extend a hand toward transcendence. Together, they create a space where doubt and devotion coexist, where radical empathy is both a question and an answer.
Tolstoy’s radical vision positioned simplicity as a form of defiance, one against excess, against hierarchy, and against moral complacency. The works in this exhibition resist grand narratives in favor of intimate moments of revelation. They embody quiet acts of transformation, where simplicity itself becomes a revolutionary gesture, a call to return to what is most vital and true.
Material speaks in ways words cannot. The artists of this exhibition embrace simplicity and expose the texture of the soul through the surfaces of their work. Whether raw and unrefined, layered and intricate, or smooth and meditative, they become an expression of the spiritual self. These textures evoke the depth of experience, mirroring Tolstoy’s urgency to convey unadorned truth. Through touch, surface, and form, the ineffable takes shape, and the intangible becomes felt.
Like Tolstoy’s text, these works extend beyond their immediate moment, engaging in an ongoing conversation across centuries. They ask us, how do we live rightly? How do we love fully? How do we reconcile suffering with meaning? Each work stands as a brief but living gospel, urgent, personal, and resonant. The Gospel in Brief provokes reflection on both faith and doubt. Compelled to sit with the tensions unearthed in the exhibition, they find their own struggles and hopes within the fragmentation and unification of these narratives. Residing in the space between searching and surrendering, they offer new ways for us to see, to feel, and perhaps, to believe.