Inna Ray

American, 1949 - 2020

BiographyInna Ray was a poet who drew, a painter who made photographs, a spiritual seeker and student of feminist theology. She was above all a native Californian whose deeply felt relationship to the California landscape can be seen in her works. Born Linda Ray Hulbert in Upland in 1949, Inna majored in Art at Immaculate Heart College. Graduating in the mid-1970s, she cooked, waitressed, did paste-up at the Los Angeles Times, and shot thousands of black and white photographs of Southern California’s people, city streets, and its arroyos, mountains, and deserts.

Inna gathered a group of artists and writers to publish ten issues of NATIVE, an art and literary “zine,” between 1978 and 1983. She and designer Bonnie Barrett published a hand-bound limited edition of her poem cycle California Hours (1982; republished 2021). The Huntington Research Library's Literary Collections hold a full set of NATIVE, California Hours, Inna's other poetry books and manuscripts, her artist's sketchbooks, selected works on paper, and her Master's thesis.

Moving to the San Francisco East Bay area in the 1980s, Inna supported herself in the graphic arts, found sobriety, and claimed her gay identity. She had continued writing poems and making photos, but after earning her degree at the Franciscan seminary gravitated with a new security back to her early love of painting. She worked to develop her technique.

Newly retired, Inna moved to the Eastern Sierra in late 2010. She lived simply, moving from campground to campground. She wrote in 2011, "I came back to life in January, camped at Independence Creek for six weeks—taking photos of red birch and cottonwood… feeling the forms of the trees, the colors … It felt like the lights came back on. I cannot be an abstract painter, nor a painter of inner visions or symbols. The figure stands in nature, in trees, in landforms, bodies—the body of the world."

Later she noted, "I have been painting a patch of light on blowing oat grass in a photo from Point Pinole circa 1990. Photos of tawny, tow-headed grass glowing in the late afternoon light, tassels white against swaths of blue and brown shadow. I used to think I took too many pictures of this, now I think I didn't take enough." Selected works from this period appeared in "Sequestered Waters," her solo show at the Matarango Museum Art Gallery in Ridgecrest (2014), which now holds three of her paintings in its permanent collection.

Inna renewed her faith again and again in art as a form of discovery, of prayer, and of community. She maintained a lifelong focus of purpose, curiosity, and determination to grow. Inna died in 2020 at the home of friends, after a short illness.

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