2026
20 copies
Signed and numbered
20 copies
Signed and numbered
30,5×23,5 cm
12×9.25 in.
12×9.25 in.
Monotypes on inkjet prints on through-dyed colored paper.
Sixteen pages assembled as a leporello. Hard cover, also a monotype, featuring embossed shapes.
Printed belly band.
Sixteen pages assembled as a leporello. Hard cover, also a monotype, featuring embossed shapes.
Printed belly band.
In The Art Students League, I’ve combined historical images of the life drawing room with my own sketches from those same spaces. I’ve also turned my eye toward representing the other artists in the room — close friends like Sarah Crowner and Jade Lai — endowing my subjects with agency as they make art in a space where women were historically excluded. For me, it’s a way of connecting past and present. Ruby Sky Stiler
Ruby Sky Stiler (b. 1979) is an American artist whose practice resists categorization. Moving between painting, sculpture, and installation, she constructs spaces as much as objects, approaching exhibition-making as an extension of her artistic language. Alongside these more visible forms, however, runs a largely unseen practice: drawing. For many years, drawing has functioned as a continuous axis within her work — a space of observation, repetition, and refinement that operates parallel to her sculptural and painterly production.
For her first publication with Three Star Books, Stiler chose to foreground this activity. The fifteen works in the book originate in weekly life drawing sessions at the historic Art Students League in New York. Back in the studio, Stiler subjects each drawing to a process she has developed over time, reworking and stabilizing the image until it becomes neither preparatory sketch nor documentary trace, but a work in itself.
The project engages with a long lineage of artists negotiating the translation of their work into book form. Henri Matisse’s initial refusal to reproduce his gouache papier découpé works is a well-known example: only when the Greek publisher Tériade proposed a reproduction method capable of preserving the material presence of the original — through Jacomet’s pochoir technique — did the artist agree, resulting in Jazz”, one of the defining livres de peintre of the twentieth century (1947). This historical precedent underscores a recurring tension: painters often resist reproduction because it risks flattening the specificity of color, scale, and surface.
The strategy adopted for The Art Students League embraces this tension, instead of treating the book as documentation, Three Star Books approaches it as a site of production. Working with a specialized technique developed with the artist, the publication seeks to maintain the chromatic precision and tactile sensitivity central to Stiler’s drawings. The aim is not to replicate the original but to produce an equivalent experience — an edition in which reproduction becomes transformation.
In this sense, The Art Students League does not stand beside the work; it is the work. Each copy operates as a discrete manifestation of the drawings, dissolving the hierarchy between original and reproduction and reaffirming the artist’s practice within the specific logic of the multiple.
Ruby Sky Stiler (b. 1979) is an American artist whose practice resists categorization. Moving between painting, sculpture, and installation, she constructs spaces as much as objects, approaching exhibition-making as an extension of her artistic language. Alongside these more visible forms, however, runs a largely unseen practice: drawing. For many years, drawing has functioned as a continuous axis within her work — a space of observation, repetition, and refinement that operates parallel to her sculptural and painterly production.
For her first publication with Three Star Books, Stiler chose to foreground this activity. The fifteen works in the book originate in weekly life drawing sessions at the historic Art Students League in New York. Back in the studio, Stiler subjects each drawing to a process she has developed over time, reworking and stabilizing the image until it becomes neither preparatory sketch nor documentary trace, but a work in itself.
The project engages with a long lineage of artists negotiating the translation of their work into book form. Henri Matisse’s initial refusal to reproduce his gouache papier découpé works is a well-known example: only when the Greek publisher Tériade proposed a reproduction method capable of preserving the material presence of the original — through Jacomet’s pochoir technique — did the artist agree, resulting in Jazz”, one of the defining livres de peintre of the twentieth century (1947). This historical precedent underscores a recurring tension: painters often resist reproduction because it risks flattening the specificity of color, scale, and surface.
The strategy adopted for The Art Students League embraces this tension, instead of treating the book as documentation, Three Star Books approaches it as a site of production. Working with a specialized technique developed with the artist, the publication seeks to maintain the chromatic precision and tactile sensitivity central to Stiler’s drawings. The aim is not to replicate the original but to produce an equivalent experience — an edition in which reproduction becomes transformation.
In this sense, The Art Students League does not stand beside the work; it is the work. Each copy operates as a discrete manifestation of the drawings, dissolving the hierarchy between original and reproduction and reaffirming the artist’s practice within the specific logic of the multiple.
A the Berlin studio where the “Average Lamp” was produced. Photos: Jens Ziehe