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Nancy Rubins, Worlds Apart, 1982 © Nancy Rubins. Photo: Irv Tepper

In Conversation

Nancy Rubins, Eric Shiner, Phong Bui

Monday, October 30, 2023, 6–8pm
Powerhouse Arts, New York
www.powerhousearts.org

Join Powerhouse Arts for a conversation between Nancy Rubins; Eric Shiner, president of Powerhouse Arts; and Phong Bui, publisher and artist director of the Brooklyn Rail, to celebrate the release of Rubins’s new monograph Fluid Force, which includes contributions by Shiner and Bui. A survey of the artist’s work to date, the book collects five decades of her gravity-defying practice and invites the reader to linger on her investigations of materiality. The trio will discuss Rubins’s fascination with form and matter and her exploration of the notions of what sculpture and drawing could and can be.

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Nancy Rubins, Worlds Apart, 1982 © Nancy Rubins. Photo: Irv Tepper

Nancy Rubins, 5,000 lbs. of Sonny’s Airplane Parts, Linda’s Place, and 550 lbs. of Tire-Wire, 1997, Ruby City, San Antonio © Nancy Rubins. Photo: courtesy Ruby City, San Antonio

In Conversation

Nancy Rubins
Sara Softness

Thursday, March 16, 2023, 3pm CDT
www.rubycity.org

Join Ruby City for an online conversation between Nancy Rubins and interdisciplinary curator Sara Softness. They will discuss Rubins’s sculptures, touching on her use of salvaged airplane parts in works including the one permanently installed in the sculpture garden at Ruby City. This talk is presented as part of San Antonio’s Contemporary Art Month, an annual program of events at galleries, museums, and performing art spaces throughout the city.

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Nancy Rubins, 5,000 lbs. of Sonny’s Airplane Parts, Linda’s Place, and 550 lbs. of Tire-Wire, 1997, Ruby City, San Antonio © Nancy Rubins. Photo: courtesy Ruby City, San Antonio

Nancy Rubins, Dense Bud, 2016, installation view, Chicago © Nancy Rubins. Photo: Brian Guido

Public Installation

Nancy Rubins
Dense Bud and Agrifolia Majoris

Two sculptures by Nancy RubinsDense 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

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
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 MetalTwo 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.

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Installation view, Nancy Rubins: Our Friend Fluid Metal, Art Institute of Chicago, September 30, 2021–September 26, 2022. Artwork © Nancy Rubins. Photo: Brian Guido

Installation view, Nancy Rubins: Fluid Space, Gagosian, Beverly Hills, June 24–August 6, 2021. Artwork © Nancy Rubins

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

Frank Gehry, Wishful Thinking, 2021, installation view, Frank Gehry: Spinning Tales, Gagosian, Beverly Hills, 2021 © Frank O. Gehry. Photo: Joshua White

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

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Announcements

Nancy Rubins, Mattresses and Cakes, 1993, installation view, 45th Biennale di Venezia © Nancy Rubins

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

Nancy Rubins, Monochrome II, 2010–18, installation view, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art,  Bentonville, Arkansa © 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

Still of Nancy Rubins in conversation with Tyler Green

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

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

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

Photo: Brian Guido

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

Nancy Rubins at Landmarks

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.

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Museum Exhibitions

Nancy Rubins, Diversifolia #1, 2017 © Nancy Rubins

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After “The Wild”
Contemporary Art from the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation Collection

March 24–October 1, 2023
Jewish Museum, New York
thejewishmuseum.org

Barnett Newman (1905–1970) was a generous supporter of his colleagues, who befriended and mentored countless younger artists. After his death, Annalee Newman, his widow, created the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation to help further the spirit of great art by providing grants. Diverse in style, training, background, and age, the foundation’s grantees—whose works make up this exhibition—share Newman’s seriousness of purpose, as well as his unrelenting drive to explore the outer limits of his own ideas. Work by Michael Heizer, Nancy Rubins, Richard Serra, and Sarah Sze is included.

Nancy Rubins, Diversifolia #1, 2017 © Nancy Rubins

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

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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

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

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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

Nancy Rubins, Agrifauna Delicata I, 2017 © Nancy Rubins

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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

Nancy Rubins, Drawing, 2005 © Nancy Rubins

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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

Nancy Rubins, Drawing, 2005 © Nancy Rubins

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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

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