Ruth T. Segaloff
Three generations of Segaloff’s family have been storytellers, and this legacy was passed on to her. After graduating from Washington University in St. Louis, she joined VISTA, the domestic Peace Corps. She was stationed on the Nez Perce Indian Reservation in Idaho, where she came to appreciate native traditions and art. After completing her VISTA service, Ruth attended Rutgers University, where, in 1969, she earned a Masters Degree in Social Work and moved to Boston.
Ruth grew up in New Orleans during the nineteen fifties, at the violent beginnings of the civil rights movement and at the height of Joseph McCarthy’s Communist witch hunts. While she was attending college, John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy all were assassinated. Then the Vietnam War began, which gave rise to the anti-war movement, and the brutal response of the Johnson Administration. These traumatic events greatly influenced her, and war and social justice have been common themes of her artwork.
Stories have been central to Segaloff’s forty year career in social work, from which she recently retired. Through the simple act of listening to the experiences of her clients, they could hear their own stories in a new way that stressed their strengths and accomplishments.
With a colleague, she also developed “The Medicine Shield Project: Becoming Heroes of Our Own Lives,” a therapeutic activity group for Juvenile Court referred adolescents with difficulty expressing their feelings.
In 2007, Ruth formalized her career as an artist by creating “Stories in Collage and Mixed Media.” In February, 2007, Segaloff had a one woman show, “Lest We Forget,” in the T. Ross Kelly Family Gallery at the Watertown Free Library. Gradually, since then, the percentage of her time devoted to art has dramatically increased, while her social work practice has all but disappeared.
In 2009, coinciding with her sixty fifth birthday, Segaloff learned that her juvenile court specialty was eliminated due to the Commonwealth’s fiscal crisis. Thus, art, which originally was intended as a part time break from social work, has become her full time profession.
In addition to her work as an artist, in 2009, Segaloff served as an artist/mentor to young adult women in recovery from substance abuse at Medicine Wheel Productions in South Boston. In 2010, she began a journaling and art group at Girls, Inc., Lynn, for high risk adolescent girls. She continues to seek similar volunteer projects which make use of the healing power of creativity, that combine her background in both art and social work.