Ruth Liberman's text-based work explores grand narratives of history as they appear in public presentation (newspapers and books) as well as the private and personal reflections afforded in diaries and letters. The tenuous quality of handwriting and carbon typewriter film ribbon suggests the process of writing, telling, adding, and revising, paralleling the historical process of narrative presentation. Individual voices include suppressed dissidents of the American left, witnesses and victims of police brutality, and witnesses of atrocities during the Nazi regime.

Liberman's work examines the way these events are presented and absorbed into history. Her work struggles to keep the questions of history alive and open. Ruth

Liberman grew up in Germany, and has exhibited her work in Caracas and Toronto as well as the US, and will be exhibiting at the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt in 2001. She is an alumna the Whitney Independent Study.