Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

Jon Rubin is an interdisciplinary artist who creates collaborative 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. Rubin has exhibited at the Shanghai Biennial; the Lyon Biennale; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; the Mercosul Biennial, Brazil; the Carnegie International; 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

This summer I’m co-facilitating, with artist Lindsey White, a free experimental summer program, Present Company, that centers how knowledge can be organically fostered by bringing a diverse group of artists together in both structured and unstructured ways. Present Company always meets in-person—both at Headlands Center for the Arts and in the greater Bay Area, where the collective group of participating artists reside. The cohort includes: Rania Ho, Ramekon O’Arwisters, Brendan Getz, DJ Meisner, evan pettiglio, Helia Pouyanfar, Jose Figueroa, Katie Dorame, Joshua Moreno, Bahaar Tadjbakhsh, Paola de la Calle, and Dana Davenport.

I am also working on the National Museum, an imaginary institution that changes its name as it moves between cities, inviting artists to wrestle with the problematics of the national and imagine what else culture might hold in common (currently taking place at OXY ARTS in Los Angeles and Beta-Local in San Juan, Puerto Rico); and The Stolen Dove, a collaborative project that sends the bronze dove from the only public monument to an Arab American in the United States from home to home around the world, carrying the story of Palestinian civil rights leader Alex Odeh and the justice that remains outstanding in his case.