Events
Support
Show Me the Signs
November 10–30, 2020
Show Me the Signs is an online benefit auction hosted by Artfizz to support the families of Black women killed by the police. Over 100 artists have created pieces in the form of protest signs for the auction, with 100 percent of the proceeds going to the African American Policy Forum’s #SayHerName Mothers Network. Work by Louise Bonnet, Piero Golia, Meleko Mokgosi, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and Nancy Rubins is included. To register to bid, visit artfizz.com.
Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Breonna Taylor, 2020 © Nathaniel Mary Quinn
Public Installation
Sculpture in the City 2019
Nancy Rubins
June 2019–April 2020
Various locations in London
www.sculptureinthecity.org.uk
Nancy Rubins’s Crocodylius Philodendrus (2016–17) has remained on view in London’s Square Mile to be featured again in Sculpture in the City, an annual urban sculpture park. Clusters of animal forms are arranged in balanced compression and secured with tensile cables. “Tensegrity,” the term for the structural property that Rubins employs, galvanizes the aluminum, brass, bronze, and cast iron animals into purely formal, abstract components that propel into space due to their aggregate momentum. The work is from her series Diversifolia, which was first exhibited last year at Gagosian, Britannia Street, London.
Nancy Rubins, Crocodylius Philodendrus, 2016–17 © Nancy Rubins. Photo: Lucy Dawkins
Public Installation
Nancy Rubins in
Sculpture in the City 2018
June 27, 2018–April 15, 2019
Various locations in London
www.sculptureinthecity.org.uk
Nancy Rubins’s Crocodylius Philodendrus (2016–17) is featured in Sculpture in the City, an annual urban sculpture park set in London’s Square Mile. Clusters of animal forms are arranged in balanced compression and secured with tensile cables. “Tensegrity,” the term for the structural property that Rubins employs, galvanizes the bronze animals into purely formal, abstract components that propel into space due to their aggregate momentum. The work is from her series Diversifolia, which was first exhibited at Gagosian, Britannia Street, London, earlier this year.
Nancy Rubins, Crocodylius Philodendrus, 2016–17 (detail) © Nancy Rubins. Photo: Brian Guido
Installation
Nancy Rubins
August 3–6, 2017
CenturyLink Field Event Center, Seattle
www.seattleartfair.com
Three sculptures by Nancy Rubins will be installed throughout the public areas of the Seattle Art Fair. Known for her large-scale assemblages of found objects, this selected presentation of studies allows for an intimate consideration of the artist’s iconic boat sculptures and reveals the system of compression and tension utilized in the large-scale works.
Nancy Rubins, Study: Big Edge, 2009. Photo: Rob Ebeltoft
In Conversation
Nancy Rubins
Jenny Gheith
Saturday, August 5, 2017, 3:30pm
CenturyLink Field Event Center, Seattle
www.seattleartfair.com
Nancy Rubins will discuss her artistic practice of transforming industrial, manufactured objects—such as mattresses, appliances, and boats—into physically commanding monumental sculptures with Jenny Gheith, curator at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The event is free with admission to the fair.
Photo: Joel Searles
In Conversation
Nancy Rubins
Tyler Green
Thursday, April 13, 2017, 4:30pm
Film/Video Theater, Wexner Center
for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio
www.wexarts.org
Wexner Center for the Arts will host a talk with Nancy Rubins and Tyler Green, which will later be broadcast on Green’s award-winning, influential podcast The Modern Art Notes. The pair will discuss Rubins’s practice and her participation in the exhibition Gray Matters, which explores the work of artists in the nuanced realm between black and white, and which opens at the Wexner Center on May 20. The event is free and open to the public.
Photo: Caren Levin
Announcements
Video
Nancy Rubins
Monochrome II
Nancy Rubins’s Monochrome II (2010–18) has been permanently installed in the North Forest of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. In this video Rubins speaks about her thought process around the work, which is composed of recycled aluminum canoes and small boats, anchored around a steel armature.
Nancy Rubins, Monochrome II, 2010–18, installation view, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansa © Nancy Rubins
Video
Nancy Rubins
Tyler Green
Nancy Rubins and art historian and critic Tyler Green were filmed live for an episode of the award-winning Modern Art Notes Podcast, hosted by Green. The pair discuss Rubins’s work in the exhibition Gray Matters at the Wexner Center for the Arts at the Ohio State University, Columbus.
Still of Nancy Rubins in conversation with Tyler Green
Video
Nancy Rubins
Installation at Ruby City
Watch as Nancy Rubins’s 5,000 lbs. of Sonny’s Airplane Parts, Linda’s Place, and 550 lbs. of Tire-Wire (1997) gets installed at Ruby City, a contemporary art center in San Antonio, Texas, opening October 13, 2019. Designed by Adjaye Associates in collaboration with Alamo Architects, Ruby City will provide a space for the city’s thriving creative community to experience works by both local and internationally acclaimed artists.
Nancy Rubins’s 5,000 lbs. of Sonny’s Airplane Parts, Linda’s Place, and 550 lbs. of Tire-Wire (1997) being installed at Ruby City in San Antonio, Texas, 2019
Honor
Nancy Rubins
The Museum of Arts and Design will honor Nancy Rubins at the MAD Ball 2018 on November 6, 2018, in New York. Recipients of this distinction exemplify the museum’s mission to celebrate leadership and the creative process of art making that enhance contemporary life.
Photo: Brian Guido
Video
Nancy Rubins at Landmarks
Nancy Rubins speaks about her art practice as it was inspired by her father—with a focus on the “means of the process” rather than on the end result—and discusses the process and production of her 2015 work Monochrome for Austin, located in Austin, Texas.
Video
Nancy Rubins
Big Pleasure Point
This clip shows the installation of Nancy Rubins’s Big Pleasure Point (2006) at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York.
Museum Exhibitions
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
Closed
Gray Matters
May 20–July 30, 2017
Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University, Columbus
wexarts.org
This multifaceted survey features the work of thirty-seven contemporary women artists who have explored the practice of creating en grisaille—in shades of gray. The works on display reveal the truly vibrant and variegated spectrum of black, white, and gray. Work by Nancy Rubins and Rachel Whiteread is included.
Nancy Rubins, Drawing, 2005 © Nancy Rubins