Nancy Rubins

Nancy Rubins (born 1952) is an American sculptor and installation artist. Her sculptural works are primarily composed of blooming arrangements of large rigid objects such as televisions, small appliances, camping and construction trailers, hot water heaters, mattresses, airplane parts, rowboats, kayaks, canoes, surfboards, and other objects. Works such as Big Edge at CityCenter in Las Vegas contain over 200 boat vessels. Stainless Steel, Aluminum, Monochrome I, Built to Live Anywhere, at Home Here, at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, contains 66 used aluminum boats and rises to a height of 30 ft.

Early life and career Rubins was born in Naples, Texas. Her family moved to Cincinnati before settling in Tullahoma, Tennessee. She studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland, where she received her BFA in 1974, and then at the University of California, Davis, where she received her MFA in 1976. Rubins taught at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, and Florida State University in Tallahassee, before moving to New York. In New York, along with teaching she ran a house painting business. She was inspired by the work of Peter Voulkos and Robert Arneson.

After college, Rubins taught night classes at City College of San Francisco and scavenged the local Goodwill and Salvation Army stores in San Francisco, where she was living at the time, collecting nearly 300 television sets for 25 to 50 cents apiece. Soon after, Rubins was offered a commission for another public installation. In 1982, the Washington Project for the Arts funded Rubins's Worlds Apart, The sculpture was taken down as soon as the permit expired. Already by the mid-1980s she had begun regularly using abandoned airplane parts in her work. Her contact for the plane parts was Bill Huffman in the Mojave desert.

Rubins also started working with assembling discarded cast- aluminum playground structures. Most of these structures were built out of melted down WWII materials. These pieces were shown at the Gagosian gallery in 2014.

Aside from sculpture, Rubins is known for her large scale graphite drawings which resemble lead sheets. thumb

lla. 2007

Exhibitions Rubins's work has been shown internationally. Her solo museum exhibitions include those hosted by Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (1994); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1995); ARTPACE, San Antonio (1997); Miami Art Museum (1999); Fonds regional d'art contemporain de Bourgogne, France (2005); SculptureCenter, Long Island City, New York (2006); Lincoln Center, New York (2006); and Navy Pier, Chicago (2013). In 1993, Rubins was invited to participate in the Venice Biennale. She was included in the Whitney Biennial that same year. Large scale, outdoor sculptures are on permanent display at institutions throughout the world, including the Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, Université Paris Diderot, Paris and on the University of Texas at Austin campus.

Awards

Maryland Institute College of Art Alumni Award (2000) Flintridge Foundation Visual Artist Award (1997–98) Rockefeller Foundation Travel Award (1993) The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Awards in Painting, Sculpture, Printmaking, Photography, and Craft Media (1991) Creative Artists Public Service Grant, New York State Council for the Arts (1981) National Endowment for the Arts (1981, 1980, 1977)

Sculptures Big Bil-Bored, Berwyn, IL (1980) Chas’ Stainless Steel, Mark Thompson’s Airplane Parts, About 1000 Pounds of Stainless Steel Wire, and Gagosian's Beverly Hills Space, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA (2001) Airplane Parts & Hills, Österreichischer Skulpturenpark (Austrian Sculpture Park), Unterpremstätten (2003) Pleasure Point, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA (2006) Big Pleasure Point, Lincoln Center New York, NY (2006) Big Edge, CityCenter, Las Vegas, NV (2009) Stainless Steel, Aluminum, Monochrome I, Built to Live Anywhere, at Home Here, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (2011) Monochrome for Paris, Esplanade Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Paris, France (2013)