Events
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
In Conversation
Nancy Rubins
Tyler Green
Friday, October 22, 2021, 7pm EDT
Join the Artists’ Legacy Foundation (ALF) for a conversation between Nancy Rubins and author, historian, and critic Tyler Green. The pair will discuss Rubins’s innovative sculptural practice on the occasion of her recent receipt of the 2021 ALF Artist Award, which honors an outstanding artist working primarily in painting or sculpture. To join the online event, register at eventbrite.com.
Installation view, Nancy Rubins: Fluid Space, Gagosian, Beverly Hills, June 24–August 6, 2021. Artwork © Nancy Rubins
Visit
Gallery Weekend LA
Frank Gehry, Albert Oehlen, Nancy Rubins
July 28–August 1, 2021
Los Angeles
weekend.galleryplatform.la
Gagosian is participating in the inaugural Gallery Weekend LA with three exhibitions. Frank Gehry: Spinning Tales and Nancy Rubins: Fluid Space, both on view at Gagosian’s Beverly Hills location, will be open for extended hours during Gallery Weekend LA (July 28: 10am–7pm; July 29–30: 10am–5:30pm; July 31–August 1: 12–6pm). Visitors can also see Albert Oehlen: Tramonto Spaventoso with an appointment, on view at Marciano Art Foundation (July 28–31: 11am–5pm). The event is organized through Gallery Association Los Angeles and galleryplatform.la and includes nearly eighty-five of the city’s leading contemporary art galleries and museums.
Frank Gehry, Wishful Thinking, 2021, installation view, Frank Gehry: Spinning Tales, Gagosian, Beverly Hills, 2021 © Frank O. Gehry. Photo: Joshua White
In Conversation
Nancy Rubins
Eric Shiner
Tuesday, August 3, 2021, 1pm edt
Join Gagosian for an online conversation between Nancy Rubins and Eric Shiner inside the artist’s exhibition Fluid Space, on view at Gagosian, Beverly Hills, through August 6. The pair will discuss 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. To join, register at eventbrite.com.
Left: Nancy Rubins. Photo: Joel Searles. Right: Eric Shiner. Photo: Walker Olesen
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
Announcements
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
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.
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
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