MEET DAVID S. RUBIN

David S. Rubin: Education

David S. Rubin was born in Los Angeles, California on June 18, 1949. He earned a BA degree in Philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1972. While taking art history courses as electives, Rubin correctly identified an unknown bronze as a fake on a midterm exam in a Chinese Art History course. As a result, he received encouragement from Professor Donald F. McCallum and went on to study art history at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum. Although his UCLA professor saw him as a protégé in the field of Japanese art history, once at Harvard Rubin discovered that he felt more at home in the field of Modern and Contemporary art.  This new direction was brought on in part by Rubin’s participation in a seminar on the Cubist artist Jacques Villon, where six students selected works and wrote catalog entries for the artist’s retrospective exhibition. Rubin also took museum studies courses taught by Agnes Mongan and Daniel Robbins. After earning his MA at Harvard in 1974, Rubin received a grant to study the New York School in New York City. From 1975-77, he researched the relationship between Surrealist automatism and the origins of Abstract Expressionism, with a focus on group automatic drawing sessions at the home of Roberto Matta Echaurren that were attended by Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, and others.  During this period, Rubin conducted interviews with Motherwell, Lee Krasner, Ethel Baziotes, Gordon Onslow-Ford, Peter Busa, Fritz Bultman, William Copley, and others who were active in that scene. During his New York period, Rubin published his first article in Arts Magazine and subsequently began reviewing exhibitions.  He also held a summer fellowship at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and taught a thematic survey course in art history at the School of Visual Arts.

Left: At the opening of “Jacques Villon,” Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, 1976

SAN FRANCISCO: DEVELOPING A CURATORIAL VISION

Rubin moved to San Francisco in 1983, when he was hired as Director of Exhibitions at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) and Adjunct Curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where he oversaw retrospective exhibitions for Lee Krasner and Robert Motherwell. At SFAI, he organized major retrospectives for Beat generation artists Jay DeFeo and Wally Hedrick and curated “Concerning the Spiritual: The Eighties,” featuring Los Angeles and San Francisco artists whose work explored spirituality in a contemporary context.

Right: Rubin (in white suit) organized the first Artists’ Valentines Auction at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1984. Robert Colescott performed on drums. Photo by Alex MacDonald

“In the eighties, we are again experiencing cultural restlessness, where amidst the screeching of the artists who express themselves with anger, can now be heard the softer pleas of those who turn inward, searching for the healing and nurturing alternatives to rage.”

— David S. Rubin, Catalog essay, Concerning the Spiritual: The Eighties, San Francisco Art Institute, July 1985

READING, PA AND NEW YORK CITY: A WORKING LABORATORY

In 1986, Rubin took a position directing a small college art gallery in Reading, Pennsylvania with a distinguished track record. Rubin said “yes" because the dean at Albright College, home to the Freedman Gallery, offered him a mandate to travel to New York City frequently and bring the cutting edge art back to the college to “stir things up.”  Rubin considers this venue as having been a working laboratory for exploring numerous creative ideas. During this period he organized several groundbreaking thematic exhibitions, including “Computer Assisted: The Computer in Contemporary Art,” “Contemporary Hispanic Shrines” and “Art About AIDS,” one of the first exhibitions to document artists’ responses to the AIDS epidemic. He also organized retrospective exhibitions for Cynthia Carlson and Donald Lipski, and oversaw an artist/architect collaboration between Adele Santos and Mary Miss.

Left: Rubin was the project director for an artist/architect collaboration between Mary Miss and Adele Santos, architect for the new center for the arts

CLEVELAND: GROUNDBREAKING EXHIBITIONS

Next, Rubin was hired as Associate Director/Chief Curator of Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, which today is known as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland. With support from founding director Marjorie Talalay, Rubin curated “Cruciformed: Images of the Cross since 1980,” a project he had been thinking about for several years. On the heels of its success, he was invited by the board to develop another scholarly yet risk-taking exhibition.  So he came up with “Old Glory: The American Flag in Contemporary Art,” the first major survey exhibition on the topic.  He also curated solo exhibitions for Ellen Brooks, Petah Coyne, Allen Ginsberg, Ana Mendieta, Dennis Oppenheim, Martin Puryear, Alison Saar, and others, and he was project director for “Outside the Frame: Performance and the Object,” which involved numerous complex installations. During his tenure in Cleveland, Northern Ohio LIVE magazine awarded Rubin the “Award of Achievement in Visual Arts” for “Cruciformed” and “Old Glory,” as well as a “Career Achievement Award” for his four years at the Cleveland Center.

Left: With Allen Ginsberg and Marjorie Talalay, founding director of Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art (later renamed Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland), 1991

“We are a culture that speaks to one another in signs and symbols—in visual codes that more often than not have multiple meanings. While not the only emblem available today from the vast image lexicon, the cross has proven to be among the most effective and expedient communications vehicles of our time, as it is minimal in form, substantive in content, historically grounded, and accessible to all.”

— David S. Rubin, “Primary Structures, Metaphors, and Emblems: Crosses in Contemporary Art,” Cruciformed: Images of the Cross since 1980, Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, 1991

“In 1775, as the colonists battled for freedom against the British for the first time at Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill near Boston, they hoisted a variety of flags of various designs and colors, none of which resembled the stars-and-stripes format adopted in 1777. Today, a parallel battle is taking place, as artists fight for a different kind of freedom—the right to free expression guaranteed by the First Amendment. Once again, a variety of flags of various designs and colors are being hoisted, but now they are thrust into the forefront of contemporary culture and, this time—with just cause—they exist as potent variations of the original.”

— David S. Rubin, “From U.S.A. to S.O.S.: Changing Perspectives on the American Flag,” Old Glory: The American Flag in Contemporary Art, Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, 1994

“Art serves many functions, but the most important function is to stir people and to get them to feel something and, if it does that, history has proven its great art!”

— David S. Rubin, Remarks given in interview with NBC news affiliate following public protests of the exhibition “Old Glory: The American Flag in Contemporary Art.” Phoenix, Arizona, March 17, 1996

“As a pluralist, I’m open to any genre or medium, but it does have to motivate me first.  My basic criteria for curating definitely apply in deciding what to review.  I ask four questions:  1) Is it visually engaging? 2) Does it have a fresh and unfamiliar edge? 3) Is there a fair degree of accessibility? 4) Is the work relevant to the time in which it was created?”

— David S. Rubin, Quoted in Ann Landi, “What Turns Critics On (and Off),” Vasari21, January 22, 2020