an unexplained, deadly civil war within a once-peaceable chimpanzee troupe, seeing in it an "origin story" of humanity's own history of warfare. Ruttan's inquiry and previous work led to the epic series, The Four Year War at Gombe (2009–12), seventy-five photographs and three videos in which she choreographed and filmed a reenactment of the primate war using family, friends and neighbors. The series contrasts pastoral scenes of the intact community that she modeled after Corot plein air paintings and images of 1960s American communal life with tableau of the murders (e.g., the installation, Honey Bee Watches the End Come for Willy Wally) which reference films such as Deliverance, West Side Story and Lord of the Flies. Art historian Lisa Wainwright described it as "wonderfully bizarre—primitivism gone amuck in a richly verdant setting." Interpretations varied; many critics saw a dark, Biblical or Shakespearean meditation on humanity's perhaps genetic propensity for violence, tribalism and instinctive action. Others detected subtle hope in the disjuncture between the human reenactment and the original primate behaviors. Michael Weinstein wrote that the series evoked "a mixture of humor, absurdity, depression, truth and self-recognition." Ceramic works on war Ruttan returned to human affairs in 2011 to consider war and its effects on communities. Inspired by Han Dynasty funerary models, she chose to work in ceramics for its physicality, intimacy, and ability to break through the desensitization of media images to facilitate empathy. Her series, "A Bad Idea Seems Good Again" (2011–6), consists of approximately 30 small-scale, ceramic maquettes of devastated buildings based on photographs of war-torn Beirut. (The "Dark City" series of 2016–7 focused on destruction in Aleppo and Homs, Syria.) Critics and curators described them, variously, as uncanny, disorienting, "eerily beautiful, and graphic in their depiction," noting how Ruttan's material and formal choices complicated the work's reception. In a jarring mix of aesthetics, memorial and documentation, the sculptures juxtapose familiar International Style architectural grids and objet d'art scale and beauty against the reality of rubble, collapse and (undepicted) death. Ruttan's decisions to leave some of the buildings intact on one side—thus portraying the transition and path from whole to collapse—and to place others on low tables organized like city-block grids had a similar effect, positioning viewers to embody time and destruction as they moved around the work. Critics linked the uncomfortable, God's-eye view to a distanced, perhaps American perspective, interpreting the works overall as a reflection on