Left to right: Nate Lowman, Trash Landing Marilyn #4, 2011; Christopher Wool, Untitled, 1990; Richard Prince, New England Nurse, 2002
American Exuberance
November 30, 2011—July 27, 2012
American Exuberance at the Rubell Family Collection/Contemporary Arts Foundation will include 64 artists and 190 artworks, 40 of which were made in 2011, many specifically for this exhibition.
American Exuberance will occupy all 28 galleries in the 45,000 sq. ft. museum, and all works in the exhibition are drawn from the Rubell Family Collection/Contemporary Arts Foundation. A 244-page catalog will be available, with writings by 13 artists in the exhibition including Kathryn Andrews, Frank Benson, Hannah Greely, Thomas Houseago, Richard Jackson, Rashid Johnson, Nate Lowman, John Miller, Richard Prince, Sterling Ruby, Haim Steinbach, Ryan Trecartin, and Kaari Upson.
Visit our online bookstore to order the catalog.
Exhibition Statement
In our efforts to understand the America we live in today, we turn toward contemporary art and artists. The 64 artists in American Exuberance, all citizens or residents of this country, are keen observers of American culture, economy and politics – whatever their country of origin.
In its totality, the exhibition creates a portrait of the American condition. The artworks span the last few decades for context, with a focus on works made in today’s America.
We asked a number of participating artists to comment on American Exuberance for the catalog. Many of them conceived original texts. The following is an excerpt from John Miller’s essay that has deeply informed our understanding of the subject:
“American exuberance is part myth and part reality… Paradoxically, exuberance is linked to stagnation, entropy and ruin. Its efflorescence becomes mirage-like. For the artists, these conditions are materials.”
Installation view, Sterling Ruby, American Exuberance exhibition, 2011-12
American Exuberance and Incubation Exhibition Sponsors
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INCUBATION by Jennifer Rubell
Jennifer Rubell presents her 11th annual breakfast installation, Incubation, opening Wednesday, November 30 from 9 a.m. to noon and continuing every morning through Sunday, December 4.
Incubation is an exploration of the creative act, simultaneously addressing the creation of food, the creation of life, and the creation of art. The installation incorporates two essential halves of the creative act: an incubation gallery where yogurt is being made; and an observation gallery where the yogurt is anointed with honey and then consumed.
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 Just Right, an interactive food installation by Jennifer Rubell
Wednesday, December 1st through Sunday, December 5th, 9 am to noon
OFFICIAL OPENING: Wednesday, December 1st, 9am to noon
Just Right has been generously sponsored by illycaffè. Complimentary espresso from illycaffè will be provided in the sculpture garden. www.illy.com
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Past Exhibitions: Dec 1, 2010 - Aug 26, 2011
HOW SOON NOW
How Soon Now features over thirty of the worldʼs most compelling contemporary artists including Cecily Brown, Thea Djordjadze, Huan Yong Ping, Matthew Day Jackson, Analia Saban, Ryan Trecartin, Kaari Upson and David Wojnarowicz. This exhibition, occupying 27 galleries, is comprised of paintings, sculptures, photographs and videos never before exhibited in the Foundation. The artworks in this show, all of which are owned by the Collection and most of which are recent acquisitions, form disparate bodies of work from a range of generations and include established and emerging artists.
 
TIME CAPSULE, AGE 13 TO 21:
THE CONTEMPORARY ART COLLECTION OF JASON RUBELL
Time Capsule, Age 13 to 21: The Contemporary Art Collection of Jason Rubell is an exhibition that Jason Rubell first curated for his college thesis at Duke University in 1991. It contains 95 artworks he acquired between 1983 and 1991 and features 53 artists from this period, such as George Condo, Robert Gober, Andreas Gursky, Keith Haring, Cady Noland, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Cindy Sherman and Rosemarie Trockel. This exhibition traveled to ten university art museums between 1991 and 1994. Jason Rubellʼs experience presenting this exhibition to and for the public greatly informed the opening of the Rubell Family Collection in 1994 with his family. His collecting efforts since that time have been in collaboration with his parents Don and Mera Rubell. The exhibition is a time capsule illustrating Jason Rubellʼs early collecting endeavors and bears witness to numerous artistic movements of the 1980ʼs.
2010-2011 Exhibition Sponsor: Lanvin
 As the world's oldest Parisian fashion house, Lanvin is delighted to be collaborating with the Rubell Family Collection in its support of young artists. Since his tenure, Artistic Director Alber Elbaz has used his keen artistic sensibility to preserve Jeanne Lanvin's understanding of art and fashion. Starting at ArtBasel and building over the course of the year, the conversation initiated between the Rubell Family Collection and Lanvin will bring to life a groundbreaking dialogue between contemporary art and fashion.
December 2nd, 2010
Exhibition opening for How Soon Now, Time Capsule
and installation by Jennifer Rubell, Just Right
Getty sponsored talks, Learning from LA, held at the Rubell Family Collection featuring Los Angeles artists from
How Soon Now and the upcoming Getty initiative Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980.
From left to right: Getty Research Institute Consulting Curator Glenn Phillips, Artists John Baldessari and Analia Saban
From left to right: Hammer Museum Curator Ali Subotnik, Artists Eleanor Antin and Kaari Upson
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December 2, 2009 – August 27, 2010
Beg Borrow and Steal presents paintings, sculptures, photographs, videos and installations by seventy-four artists from the Rubell Family Collection/Contemporary Arts Foundation and occupies twenty-eight galleries at the 45,000 sq ft museum. It is accompanied by a large-format 272-page catalog.
In 2005 the Rubells had a series of conversations with artists Kelly Walker and Wade Guyton, who talked about the generosity of some artists in the nature of their work. Walker and Guyton described how artists like Cady Noland, Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp and Richard Prince opened doors for other artists like themselves to walk through. The Rubells had never heard that opinion expressed as honestly before. This show was borne out of those conversations, and its title comes from a quote attributed to Picasso: “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” While the question of artistic influence may not be new, what artists choose to borrow or steal, and from whom, is distinct in that it becomes a reflection of their own time. Beg Borrow and Steal presents artists’ attempts to build on the legacies of their predecessors as they present their own new ideas. Art about art and “stolen” imagery has fueled many an artist’s production, and this exhibition contains numerous landmark examples by internationally renowned contemporary artists.
Rubell Family Statement: Our Process
Every show at the Rubell Family Collection is comprised entirely of work we own, and it is inevitably new acquisitions that provide the inspiration for these exhibits. The more recent work forces us to look at the rest of the collection in a new context, establishing new dialogues between artworks that we then make visible in the mounting of the exhibition. Usually, by the time we’ve traced a particular aesthetic, conceptual or social thread through to the late ‘60’s, where our collection begins, and beyond, we have gained a deeper understanding of the new work, its critical underpinnings, and its context in art history.
Today, something new is happening, and its meaning is not immediately evident to us. We know it has something to do with appropriation – of style, images, strategies, techniques, forms – in a way that is utterly different from the appropriation that preceded it: Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Sherrie Levine, Jeff Koons, Cady Noland, Richard Prince. Many of the newer group of artists deal with the multi-layered, explosively dense quality of the Internet and aspects of what has come to be known as Web 2.0 culture. We do not believe, however, that this new work simply reflects our current technological and social reality.
The most interesting contemporary art almost always engages with a future that is not yet known, and we believe this new work is dealing with that future. The same way Andy Warhol predicted our current culture of fame, artists today are working around something we are just beginning to understand. It has to do with information overload, time, the collapse of time, indistinct authorship, virtuality and intense individuality. In the future, there might be a simple explanation, but for the moment it is a glorious mess of things.
In this exhibition, we have 260 works by 74 artists of different generations. As collectors, we feel privileged to embrace that which is new or feels new and to put it into an art historical context we can identify. Critics, curators, scholars and time will bring form and a deeper understanding to this, but we are thrilled to be here now. Through 45 years of collecting, the present has always been our greatest inspiration.
Photo Credit: Kwaku Alston
Inside Our Process | Rubell Family
We only show art we own. That is a founding principle of the Rubell Family Collection, a principle that gives us tremendous freedom and enormous constraints. When we set out to conceptualize a new exhibition, we know we will only get the depth and quality we seek if we already have a strong foundation of works by a core group of artists. Once the exhibition is determined, we then collect into it, buying works that we consider essential right up to the closing date for the catalogue, just one month before the opening of the show...
Artists in the exhibition
Educational tour in the Rubell Family Collection
Schools Museum Educator Linda Manguel
interacts with students
 December 5, 2007 - November 28, 2008
This, John Stezaker’s first solo show in an American public institution, brings together 17 works that span 28 years of his production and illustrates the variable relation, over these many years, between ground image and insert image. Combing the aisles of flea markets, used-book stores, postcard vendors, etc., Stezaker’s anthropological search filters and selects images that often have a strong sense of déjà vu: Hollywood film stars of a bygone age, postcards of the top-of-the-pops of historical monuments, nature scenes and curiosities...
December 5, 2007 - November 28, 2008
Hernan Bas: Works from the Rubell Family Collection includes thirty-eight works in various media by the young Miami-based artist that were collected over the past ten years by the Rubell family. Born in 1978 and a graduate of New World School of the Arts in Miami, Bas has become one of South Florida’s most celebrated artists. His work, which incorporates romantic and classical imagery, finds inspiration in youth and Goth culture, fashion layouts, and books, among them the Hardy Boys series, as well as the work of Wilde, Huysmans, and other writers of the Aesthetic and Decadent period of literature reimagined from the perspective of a young gay artist. At the center of the exhibition is a specially commissioned, grand-scale video and sculpture installation, Ocean's Symphony, a sumptuous tribute to the myth of the mermaid.
Traveling History:
February 27 – May 24, 2009
Brooklyn Museum, Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing, 4th Floor
December 6, 2007 – May 30, 2008
Rubell Family Collection, Miami
 December 5, 2007 - November 28, 2008
How does an entire continent redefine itself? What is a European? How do present-day Europeans deal with the memory of two world wars? How does the inheritance of a colonial past impact the current generation? How do contemporary artists deal with the weight of their own cultural history? How do these artists define themselves through their desire to participate in a dialogue of NOW? Is there a contemporary European aesthetic? “Euro-Centric, Part 1” is the first of a series of exhibitions over the coming years that will attempt to address these questions.
This major exhibition will be presented in 16 of the 27 galleries that constitute the RFC exhibition space.
Artists in the exhibition:
December 4, 2006 - May 31, 2007
For the first time in its history, the Rubell Family Collection (RFC) has dedicated its entire 45,000-square-foot museum space to a single exhibition. Red Eye: Los Angeles Artists from the Rubell Family Collection presents a cross section of the artwork produced in Los Angeles over the past 20 years by 36 L.A.-based artists – some iconic, some mid-career, some relatively new. When exhibited collectively the artworks created by this multi-generational group represent a substantial history, both of L.A.’s art scene and of RFC itself. Red Eye is scheduled to open December 4th, 2006.
Artists in the exhibition
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Doug Aitken
John Baldessari
Frank Benson
Amy Bessone
Mark Bradford
Chris Burden
Brian Calvin
Aaron Curry
Brian Fahlstrom
Mark Grotjahn
Karl Haendel
Richard Hawkins
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Evan Holloway
Violet Hopkins
Thomas Houseago
Mike Kelley
Barbara Kruger
Nathan Mabry
Paul McCarthy
Jason Meadows
Matthew Monahan
Kristen Morgin
Catherine Opie
Kaz Oshiro
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Laura Owens
Raymond Pettibon
Charles Ray
Jason Rhoades
Ry Rocklen
Sterling Ruby
Lara Schnitger
Jim Shaw
Yutaka Sone
Catherine Sullivan
Ricky Swallow
Henry Taylor
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 November 28, 2005 - May 28, 2006
The first exhibition of this young German artist in America. This show brings together dark and ominous paintings, nature scenes, gothic forests and very intimate spaces and fantasies.
Checklist & Images
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