HWS News
5 February 2026 • Alums Teaching the Teacher
Brittany Coburn ’17 and Professor Nick Ruth collaborate on “In the Shadow,” an exhibition shaped by shared experimentation, technical exchange and mutual respect.
“If you become a teacher, by your pupils you’ll be taught,” wrote Oscar Hammerstein II for a song in “The King and I,” and that’s being played out by Professor of Art and Architecture Nick Ruth and Brittany Coburn ’17.
Coburn is co-curating an exhibit called “In the Shadow” at the RAM Gallery in Summit, N.J., where she works. Ruth is one of the exhibitors. Coburn not only brought Ruth into the show, but she also taught him the technique he used to make three of his six pieces on display.
At HWS, Coburn took just one class, abstract painting, from Ruth but began to work with him in 2023 after she earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from the Savannah College of Art and Design and began to make her way in the world as an artist. When she came back to Geneva, Ruth hired her to teach him.
“My interests are broader than my skill set,” Ruth says, “so I recognize the value of collaboration when I want to do something that I don’t know how to do.”
Street signs form the visual theme of Ruth’s work in the show. Three of the pieces are photogravures – printmaking plates with grooves etched in them that give the photographic prints depth, texture and, to the theme of the show, shadow. They are prints of street signs – more specifically, the backs of street signs. The other three pieces are plaster reliefs – raised shapes — of street signs. This is what Ruth hired Coburn to teach him.
“I taught him how to make the molds and work with this material,” Coburn says. “It’s cast in hydrocal, which is a stronger version of plaster. Sculptors love it. It’s smooth and clean. Very stark.”
Even in her role as teacher, however, the eternally inquisitive Coburn says she continued to learn from her former instructor. “It was an awesome experience for me to work with something in such detail that wasn’t mine,” Coburn says. “He’s such a stickler. It was a great lesson for me in understanding why attention to detail is so important. When you’re doing it for someone else, it’s not your level of expectation, it’s theirs.”
The signs concept developed during Ruth’s commute between Geneva and his home in Rochester. He says he noticed the rise of cell phone towers and started to see them as objects. “They were interesting to look at,” he says. “Their bones. The shapes and the engineering were really interesting to contemplate.” This led him to think about communication in the modern world, he says, “about technological change and culture. I ended up having similar thoughts about billboards and road signs.”
Coburn has a solo show opening on Friday, Feb. 6 at the McEachern Art Center at Mercer University in Macon, Ga. It’s a 10-year retrospective of a theme she began to explore in Professor of Art and Architecture Phillia Yi’s silk-screen print-making class. “Guilty Pleasures” explores themes of mental health and the negative stigmas that surround it in contemporary society. It is, Coburn says, “an analysis of all the guilty pleasures that people lean into instead of going to therapy and asking for help.”
“My objective is to use my art to educate and to create a safe space for people to be vulnerable,” she says. “The more we talk about it, the more normalized the conversation becomes.”
It is no coincidence that Coburn recruited Ruth for the show in Summit, which runs through Feb. 22. She credits her experience at HWS and her relationships with her professors as elemental to the artist and the person that she has become.
“My time at HWS really helped me discover who I was as a person and what my real passion was for,” Coburn says. “It made me feel like I had a purpose. I had professors who made me feel that a career in the arts was attainable. Until I went to graduate school, I didn’t realize how rare this was.”
