An Artful Look at the Changing Times

There is a window in the Martha’s Vineyard Museum. Sit in the armchair next to it, look out and watch time sweep back and forth through the generations of Colin Ruel’s family. 

The window is part of an installation which makes up Mr. Ruel’s newest exhibit at the museum. Titled, The Light is Returning, the show parallels Mr. Ruel’s work with that of his late grandfather, Capt. Jimmy Morgan, in an ode to community, memory, inequity and inheritance. 

“I’m trying to show what rural Island life used to be,” Mr. Ruel told the Gazette. “This achievable cycle of birth, life, build a house, have a family, die and it goes around. This sort of perfect circle, and how this circle has sort of been broken with people’s inability to live and work here.” 

A Chilmark-based painter with roots in Menemsha spanning centuries, Mr. Ruel’s paintings depict ethereal landscapes, often telling stories of Island life. He runs the Ruel gallery —  a former craft shop his grandmother owned — in Menemsha with his wife, artist Nettie Kent. 

Mr. Ruel’s grandfather was a legendary commercial draggerman in Menemsha and a folk artist. The exhibit displays his carved seagulls and models of fishing boats; his carved weathervanes are part of the musuem’s permanent collection.

Looking through the window, one can watch generations of Mr. Ruel’s family, from film of his great grandfather fishing to iPhone videos of Colin and Nettie’s children, ages 7 and 9, playing on their lawn. Pick up the receiver of a rotary phone to listen to a series of interviews Mr. Ruel did with his family members, constructing a “Venn diagram of different eras.” 

That narrative culminates in the present moment, one of widening wealth gaps and lack of stable, affordable housing on the Island. It’s a familiar struggle for Islanders, especially young artists, business owners and parents. Real estate prices have been climbing for decades as the seasonal economy intensifies, pricing out long-time Islanders, including Mr. Ruel and his wife. 

Mr. Ruel’s family rents a house in Chilmark, and was saving to buy a house until Island real estate exploded in 2020 and that plan “all went out the window,” he said.

Driving the exhibit is Mr. Ruel’s frustration with a seasonal community that aestheticizes rural life, along with “the gluttony of people who come here, deciding to possess everything with no thought to destroying generational community bonds and people,” he said. 

He’s not alone: the exhibit includes oral histories from Islanders speaking about their own struggles with housing.

But despite that feeling, Mr. Ruel’s exhibit is not an angry one. Rather, it is a testimony of displacement and his dream of generational stability: owning a house to pass onto his children. 

Mr. Ruel channels the legacy of his grandfather’s models and folk style in his paintings, a series of scenes that depict the cycle of Island life. In one section, he displays his grandfather’s personal effects — a watch, his dentures, sketches for a sloop. 

In another part of the exhibit, Mr. Ruel displays one of his grandfather’s scrimshaws — a carved or handpainted swordfish sword — painted with scenes of boating and fishing. Below it is Mr. Ruel’s own scrimshaw in the folk style of his grandfather, depicting his hopes and wishes: a house, a garden, a place to work and his family beside it. 

The exhibit runs through August 16. Mr. Ruel said he hopes summer residents who see it will understand the deep emotions associated with the housing crisis. 

“[Summer residents] can’t even imagine what it’s like not having a home, or worried about losing housing in a place where you have generational roots,” he said. “They don’t feel what that means. I want them to feel what that means.” 

Friends, family and other residents packed the museum for the exhibit opening last Friday. Many reflected on their own experiences of the “Vineyard shuffle” — continually moving between rentals as the season shifts.  

“I’ve experienced so many different iterations of housing insecurity and loss,” said Lexie Roth, co-owner of the food truck Goldie’s Rotisserie and a long time friend of Mr. Ruel. Her family had to sell their house in Aquinnah, which had briefly become Ms. Roth’s full-time home and inheritance. 

Now, she moves between rentals that are harder and harder to come by. 

Ms. Roth shares Mr. Ruel’s dream of ownership on the Island. For her, that dream is encompassed in the ability to plant perennials and raise children here, improving upon and growing with a single place. 

“I have pretty much given up on that dream being possible here,” she said. 

Ms. Roth returned to the exhibit on Wednesday to look at Mr. Ruel’s paintings again, sit in the chair and pick up the phone to listen to Islanders’ oral accounts.

“I just love how Colin can lean into the not-so-pretty things that are so important to talk about and be aware of,” she said. “I think art…is a way to connect the human experience and the human condition together, and that’s how things change.”

This article appears in May 22, 2026.