About
I realized that this stuff has been around a long time, and it’s passed through this odd transition. Before it was in the earth, it was floating as a molecule in outer space—it was part of somebody’s star, or part of somebody’s exploding planet.
—Nancy Rubins
Through sculptures assembled from discarded materials and graphite drawings that assume the appearance of liquid metal, Nancy Rubins transforms quotidian objects into artworks that exceed the sums of their parts. She explores the precariousness and limits of natural forces through large-format pieces with formidable psychological and physical presence. Working with salvaged commercial and industrial materials since the late 1970s, Rubins frequently combines features of assemblage and monumental sculpture to create dynamic works that are at once familiar and otherworldly.
Rubins has been preoccupied with achieving seemingly impossible production feats throughout much of her artistic career, bridging the worlds of engineering and art. In 1974 she completed a BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and then moved to the West Coast to study at the University of California at Davis, where she received an MFA two years later. Around this time, she began collecting used appliances—from hair dryers to electric shavers, toaster ovens to televisions—which she included in large, semiflexible wall-like sculptures. Initially sourcing her materials from garbage dumps and thrift stores, Rubins mined not only the vast quantities of objects at her disposal, but also the history of each salvaged item.
From her early-1980s accumulations of domestic devices, which she assembled into gigantic tornado- or tidal-wave-shaped forms, Rubins’s practice evolved in the 1990s to include immense clusters of sizeable objects, such as boats, mattresses, or the deconstructed parts of enormously complex, manufactured machinery like airplanes and trailers. Rubins amasses these components into biological or arboreal growth patterns that often cantilever over pedestrian traffic below. As she does so, she continues to focus on the formal qualities of the salvaged objects.
#NancyRubins
Exhibitions
In Conversation
Nancy Rubins and Eric Shiner
The pair discuss Nancy Rubins’s unique approach to sculpture, in which industrial and found objects—such as television sets, airplane parts, and carousel animals—are transformed into engineered abstractions that are at once otherworldly and familiar.
Conclusions Never Reached: Nancy Rubins in Fluid Space
Sara Softness reflects on a new series of sculptures by Nancy Rubins, Fluid Space (2019–21), “visual poems” that hint at the invisible and the unknown.
Nancy Rubins: Exploring Form
Join Nancy Rubins at her California studio as she speaks about her working process and the abiding interests in space, depth, and the residues of time that have informed her sculptures and drawings.
Behind the Art
Nancy Rubins: Drawing in Graphite
Filmed during the installation of Nancy Rubins’s latest exhibition, Diversifolia, this video provides a rare look at one of the artist’s large-scale, graphite drawings.
Work in Progress
Nancy Rubins
In the summer of 2017, Laura Fried took a trip to Nancy Rubins’s awe-inspiring studio in Topanga Canyon, CA. In this essay, she recounts her visit, detailing Rubins’s latest sculptures and the history of the studio.
Fairs, Events & Announcements
Public Installation
Nancy Rubins
Dense Bud and Agrifolia Majoris
Two sculptures by Nancy Rubins—Dense Bud (2016) and Agrifolia Majoris (2017)—are currently on public display in Chicago as part of a partnership program between the Chicago Park District and EXPO Chicago’s IN/SITU Outside program, which installs temporary public art installations along the lakefront and throughout Chicago neighborhoods.
Nancy Rubins, Dense Bud, 2016, installation view, Chicago © Nancy Rubins. Photo: Brian Guido
In Conversation
Nancy Rubins
Ann Goldstein
Thursday, September 1, 2022, 2–3pm
Art Institute of Chicago
www.artic.edu
Join Nancy Rubins and Ann Goldstein, deputy director and Dittmer Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, for a conversation about the artist’s exhibition Our Friend Fluid Metal. Two works from this series are presented in Chicago for the first time in an installation composed by Rubins for the Art Institute’s Bluhm Family Terrace. In these works, Rubins transforms children’s equipment from playgrounds, amusement parks, and coin-operated rides into dynamic, colorful sculptures that uncannily cantilever and bloom out of the ground.
Installation view, Nancy Rubins: Our Friend Fluid Metal, Art Institute of Chicago, September 30, 2021–September 26, 2022. Artwork © Nancy Rubins. Photo: Brian Guido
Award
Nancy Rubins
Artists’ Legacy Foundation Artist Award
Nancy Rubins has won the Artists’ Legacy Foundation (ALF) Artist Award for 2021. Since 2007, ALF has recognized and honored the accomplishments of an outstanding visual artist whose primary medium is painting or sculpture. Each year ten artists are nominated for the ALF Artist Award by five anonymous nominators selected by the board, and a jury of three peers makes the final selection. Juror Mary Ceruti, executive director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, noted that Rubins “brings an expansive and experimental approach to monumental sculptures that inspire wonder while also being genuinely grounded in our lived experience and material world.”
Nancy Rubins, Mattresses and Cakes, 1993, installation view, 45th Biennale di Venezia © Nancy Rubins
Museum Exhibitions
Closed
Nancy Rubins
Our Friend Fluid Metal
September 30, 2021–September 26, 2022
Art Institute of Chicago
www.artic.edu
In her series Our Friend Fluid Metal, Nancy Rubins transforms children’s equipment from playgrounds, amusement parks, and coin-operated rides into dynamic, colorful sculptures that uncannily cantilever and bloom out of the ground. Weathered from use, this equipment was originally produced with metal recycled from World War II aircraft, and Rubins’s careful aggregations of these cast-off objects give them a new life. Two works from this series are presented in Chicago for the first time in an installation composed by the artist for the Art Institute’s Bluhm Family Terrace.
Installation view, Nancy Rubins: Our Friend Fluid Metal, Art Institute of Chicago, September 30, 2021–September 26, 2022. Artwork © Nancy Rubins. Photo: Tom Van Eynde
Closed
The Foundation of the Museum
MOCA’s Collection
May 19, 2019–January 20, 2020
Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles
www.moca.org
To mark the museum’s fortieth anniversary, this exhibition presents a selected topography of artworks that speak to the diversity of MOCA’s collecting over the past four decades. With special emphasis on works associated with the museum’s remarkable history of exhibitions, The Foundation of the Museum: MOCA’s Collection shows the institution’s holdings as shaped by a changing landscape of developments in contemporary art and curatorial focus, as well by as the social and cultural backdrops that inform them. Work by Chris Burden, Mike Kelley, Bruce Nauman, Albert Oehlen, Nancy Rubins, and Ed Ruscha is included.
Chris Burden, Exposing the Foundation of the Museum, 1986 © 2019 Chris Burden/Licensed by the Chris Burden Estate and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Squidds and Nunns
Closed
Nancy Rubins in
ARTZUID 2019
May 17–September 15, 2019
Amsterdam
www.artzuid.nl
The sixth edition of the Amsterdam Sculpture Biennial presents more than sixty figurative sculptures and spatial installations. Work by Nancy Rubins is included.
Nancy Rubins, Agrifauna Delicata I, 2017 © Nancy Rubins
Closed
Paper into Sculpture
October 14, 2017–February 4, 2018
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas
www.nashersculpturecenter.org
This exhibition plays on tensions between commonly held understandings of sculpture and what paper can and cannot do, pushed to its physical limits. Treating paper as a material with a palpable three-dimensional presence rather than as a mere support for mark making, artists in this show use processes ranging from tearing, crumpling, and cutting to scattering, binding, and adhering to create sculptural works that take a variety of forms and suggest a range of expressive and conceptual implications. Work by Nancy Rubins and Franz West is included.
Nancy Rubins, Drawing, 2005 © Nancy Rubins
Press
Cardi B, David Hockney, and Other Creative Stars Made Artworks for an Auction Benefiting the Families of Slain Black Women—See Them Here by Sarah Cascone
Artnet
October 31, 2020
Online
PDF
Nancy Rubins’s Monumental Sculptures Vibrate with Wild Intensity by Alexxa Gotthardt
Artsy
May 4, 2020
Online
PDF
The Fitter: An Interview with Nancy Rubins by Robert Enright
Border Crossings
March 1, 2018
Online
PDF
Nancy Rubins: Diversifolia; Crossroads: Kauffman, Judd and Morris – review by Laura Cumming
The Guardian
February 11, 2018
Online
PDF
The dystopian vision of Nancy Rubins’ junkyard zoo by Rachel Spence
Financial Times
February 2, 2018
Online
PDF