ruby onyinyechi amanze (b. 1982, Port-Harcourt, Nigeria) is a visual artist who draws on paper.
amanze’s practice builds around questions of how to create large-scaled drawings that maintain paper’s essence of weightlessness while simultaneously holding a multi-dimensional form or structure.

Using a limited palette of visual elements, including ada the Alien, windows and birds, amanze’s drawings are an illusion of an expansive world situated between nowhere and everywhere. Despite incorporating a recurring host of characters, amanze maintains a non-linear and non-narrative approach to representational drawing, insisting the primary antagonist is the space of the paper itself. The construction of this world is largely centered around an interest in the spatial negotiations found in the three dimensional practices of dance, architecture and design.

Most recently, amanze completed two-year long residencies at the Queens Museum and as part of the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions Program, both in New York. She has exhibited her work internationally in Lagos, London, Johannesburg and Paris, and nationally at the California African American Museum, the Drawing Center and the Studio Museum of Harlem.

amanze earned her B.F.A., Summa Cum Laude, from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, and her M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art. In 2012-2013, amanze was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

Today she resides between Philadelphia and Brooklyn, but calls multiple places home.