Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

Jon Rubin is an interdisciplinary artist who creates interventions into public life that re-imagine individual, group, and institutional behavior. His socially engaged projects include running a barter-based nomadic art school, founding a national museum that reimagines history, and co-directing a restaurant that only serves cuisine from countries with which the United States is in conflict. In 2019, with the support from Creative Capital, Rubin built an exact replica of his collaborator Sohrab Kashani’s Tehran apartment so they both could live and work together in a parallel universe that defied political and national boundaries.

Rubin has exhibited at the Shanghai Biennial; the Lyon Biennale; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; the Mercosul Biennial, Brazil; the Carnegie International; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; The Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico; as well as in backyards, living rooms, and street corners. Rubin is a Professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.

While at Headlands

While at the Headlands I plan on continuing the development of several works including research for a public project in Santa Ana, California; a screenplay I am writing with artist Sohrab Kashani that focuses on two families living in an apartment building that is located simultaneously in two countries; and an expansion of The National Museum, a public art project that asks artist and writers to repeatedly reckon with which national stories, histories and futures are deemed worth saving and which are ignored or forgotten.