In "Woman with Dependents" (2019), Ruby Neri renders the female figure in pastel on paper with an urgency that feels both primal and deeply contemporary. The medium suits her vision precisely: pastel allows for layered, worked surfaces that carry the visible evidence of the hand, building up a physical presence that resonates with her broader practice across ceramics, painting, and street art. The body here is neither idealized nor diminished but presented as what Neri consistently treats it as, a site where pleasure and unease, tenderness and tension, coexist without resolution. At 111.1 by 76.8 centimeters, the work commands attention at a scale that feels confrontational, intimate, and monumental all at once. Neri occupies a distinct position within West Coast art history, drawing on the tactile irreverence of the Bay Area Funk and Figurative movements while maintaining clear ties to the psychologically charged figuration associated with Los Angeles artists such as Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, and Charles Ray. Her grounding in the Mission School, the San Francisco-based street art community she was part of in the late 1990s, connects her practice to a tradition of mark-making that reaches back well beyond urban walls to the archaic power of pre-historical image-making. This work on paper distills those multiple inheritances into a single, pressing image. Signed by the artist, "Woman with Dependents" is a work of considerable institutional standing. Neri's practice is held in the public collections of the Berkeley Art Museum, the Hammer Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum, and she has been the subject of solo and two-person exhibitions at venues including the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and LACMA. Offered through the Free Arts NYC Benefit Auction, this is a meaningful opportunity to acquire a signed work on paper from an artist whose standing across American art institutions continues to grow. The piece will be delivered unframed.