Irwin Rubin

Irwin Rubin (1930–April 6, 2006) was an American artist and educator known for his colorfully painted wood constructions.

Biography Irwin Rubin was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1930. He studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, the Cooper Union, and at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture, where he studied under Josef Albers. Rubin died in Brooklyn, NY in 2006. Rubin had one son, Lucas (born 1971), who was appointed director of the CUNY Latin/Greek Institute in 2020.

Artistic career Rubin began working with paper collage in 1953. During his early artistic career he did extensive research into the archival properties of collage materials and adhesives, and published his studies in Arts magazine, and in Bernard Chaet's Artists at Work. He worked with pegs and blocks in low relief to explore color phenomena spatially, including the effects of primary colors reflected upon white surfaces. His work was also included in "New Directions" at Pace Gallery, a group show with construction and assemblage contributions by Jim Dine, Bernard Langlais, and Louise Nevelson. the RISD Museum in Providence, RI, and at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, NY.

Teaching career Rubin held teaching posts at the University of Texas, Austin, Rubin taught in the Architecture department at UT Austin in the mid 1950s, where he instructed Color and Freehand Drawing courses alongside John Hejduk, Robert Slutzky and others, as part of a group of faculty known as the Texas Rangers. and in Alexander Caragonne's The Texas Rangers: Notes from an Architectural Underground, (MIT Press, 1995).