b'me money. One time a boy came up and gave me a dollar. I looked over and saw his family smiling. That she neither needs nor solicits these spontaneous acts of charity makes them all the more special and surprising. Yet the Central Park ritual that has most captivated her is the dance; specically, the Saturday evening tango sessions that take place in summertime around the bronze sculpture of William Shakespeare by John Quincy Adams Ward. Watching these weekly gatherings gave Ruttenberg theinspirationforanimmersivemultimediainstallation.Tango(20102013)combinesim-age, sound, and movement with video vignettes of graceful dancers projected across a painted misen-scene accompanied by music. Like the guiding spirits in General Sherman andJudgment of Paris with Central Park Skyline, the projected couples are so lightly overlaid on the surface of the painting that they seem part the atmosphere, apparitions emerging from and melting into the night air. The effect is entrancing. Moodier and more sensual than Rutternbergs still and sunny landscapes, Tango shares their sublimity as well their agelessness. After all, these Central Park dancers are performing a ritual as old as mankind: the nocturnal ceremony around a sacred idol. An ecstatic energy animates her tenebrous watercolor studies for the nal work. Their object of veneration is not so much the towering statue of Shakespeareworthy idol though he isas the transcendent joy of rhythm, melody, and movement. In this kind of joy, writes New York Times columnist David Brooks, the cage of self-consciousness falls away, and people are fused with those around them. This kind of joy is all present tense; people are captured by and fully alive in the moment. 1 COMMUNION Those who have lost themselves in that sort of joy will recognize its reection everywhere in Ruttenbergs visions of Central Park. It is certainly the feeling that underlies her expansive Study #52 from 2018. Though similar in format to many of her earlier park landscapes, this works differs in at least one deeply meaningful respect. Here, most of the parishioners in Ruttenbergs cathedral are no longer rendered as individual souls doing this or that. Instead, they have been abstracted into patches of gold leaf across the Sheep Meadow. In medieval and Renaissance altarpieces, gold was used to denote saintliness. It was the stuff of haloes and of heaven, the light of revelation, and it serves a similar purpose hereto spiritualize the scene. Dematerialized into the golden glow, these park-goers no longer bask in the sunlight. They are the sunlight. It is in passages like this that the rituals of painting become a sacrament: a communion between the artist, the park, and the people who ll it. Personal identity succumbs to a unifying force in which the seer, the seen, and the setting become one. So says Ruttenberg herself when asked why she paints: It takes me out of myself and has given me endless joy. ROSS FINOCCHIO received his PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts in 2013. He has held research and teaching positions at New York University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Center for the History of Collecting at the Frick Art Reference Library. Most recently, he was Sir John Richardsons collaborative author on the fourth volume of his Picasso biography, A Life of Picasso: The Minotaur Years, 19331943 (Knopf, 2021). OPPOSITECAPTION TKTKTKTKTK.OVERLEAFRoller Blades, 2012, oil on canvas, 82 x 180 inches.PAGES 3435Morning Glories, 2012, MEDIUM TKTKTK, cut-paper collage , 78 x 180 -inches. 30'