About Us

Ruth Payne has worked in the visual arts for 28 years and has been the Visual Arts Coordinator at the Ferry Building Gallery for 15 years. Ruth expresses her a passion for community-building through arts and culture. With a background as a commercial display designer and working artist, Ruth’s current work focus includes curating gallery exhibitions, leading both local and international art tours, organizing special events and lectures in the gallery, assisting and consulting on municipal art projects, and working in partnership with the Harmony Arts Festival. Ruth also leads art marketing workshops, Art Is Your Business, throughout B.C. and at Hollyhock Retreat Centre, Cortes Island.

Ruth has written a number of manuals, including Display & Design, How to Present Your Artwork to a Jury, Art Is Your Business, and a booklet on the history of the Ferry Building Gallery, “Portals of the Past: 1912-1999”. (in Special Collections UBC Library, and Gov’t Publications). The creator of ARTS CONNECTION Networking Salon for Artists, and founder of the Friends of the Gallery Society for providing additional funding to the gallery, Ruth is also involved in numerous fundraising projects in the arts. With a team of art colleagues, she produced ‘Dalai Lama Through The Arts’, a project which involved art and cultural events in over 85 venues in support of the His Holiness’s 2004 visit. In 2004 Ruth was a nominee for the YWCA Women of Distinction Award and in 2007 was awarded the Unity in Diversity Award for her multicultural work in the arts in West Vancouver.