Nancy Rubins and Tyler Green in Conversation

Catch a sneak preview of an upcoming episode of the award-winning The Modern Art Notes Podcast at this onstage discussion between artist Nancy Rubins and host Tyler Green. An acclaimed art historian and critic, Green has hosted the podcast since 2011, and is currently at work on a book about influential 19th-century photographer Carleton Watkins. Renowned for her installations and assemblage-style sculptures, Rubins will be one of the artists featured in the Wexner Center exhibition Gray Matters, opening May 20.

Join us after the talk for a book signing and reception with Rubins and Wexner Center Artists Residency Award recipient Sarah Oppenheimer.

Nancy Rubins uses industrial, manufactured objects—such as mattresses, appliances, and boats—as the building blocks of her physically commanding monumental sculptures, honing the formal rather than the functional qualities of the discrete components of each piece. The recent Monochrome series, for example, features numerous canoes and rowboats, arranged around a large steel armature, like leaves on the limb of a tree. Her arrangements evoke a precarious equilibrium of objects in space, citing both the traditions of modernist American monumental sculpture as well as bricolage, which emphasizes the aesthetic possibilities of quotidian objects. Rubins was born in 1952 in Naples, Texas, received her BFA in 1974 from the Maryland Institute, College of Art, Baltimore, and her MFA in 1976 from the University of California, Davis. Recent solo exhibitions include Nancy Rubins: MoMA and Airplane Parts, Sculpture Center, New York (2006); Big Pleasure Point, Lincoln Center, New York (2006); Drawing, Sculpture, Studies, Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro (2014); and Nancy Rubins: Table and Airplane Parts, Gare de Leuglay, France (2015–17). Her work is part of numerous public collections and her large-scale outdoor sculptures are on permanent display at leading institutions throughout the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Université Paris Diderot, France. Rubins had the honor of receiving the Distinguished Women in Arts Award in 2013 by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.