Jon Rubin

Conflict Kitchen (2010-2017) was a take-out restaurant in Pittsburgh, PA, which Rubin created in collaboration with artist Dawn Weleski. The restaurant only served cuisine from countries with which the United States is in conflict. The restaurant rotated identities every few months to focus on a different country.[3] Conflict Kitchen has featured cuisine from Afghanistan, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Venezuela, and the Haudenosuanee nations. The restaurant is currently closed.[4]

Conflict Kitchen in Schenley Plaza, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with Afghanistan cuisine

Fruit and Other Things (2018-2019) is a project created in collaboration with artist Lenka Clayton commissioned by the Carnegie Museum of Art for the 2018 iteration of the Carnegie International. The project pulls from the specific context and history of the Carnegie International, which in its earliest years, selected artworks for its exhibitions from an international competition. From 1896 to 1931, artists submitted artworks to be considered for the exhibition, and the museum kept not only detailed records of the accepted works, but of those that were rejected as well. Over this 35 year span, 10,632 artworks were rejected from the exhibitions.[5] In this project, Rubin and Clayton have hired a team of sign painters to meticulously render the titles of each rejected work, one by one. Each text painting is exhibited for a day, and then given away to visitors, totaling 10,632 paintings created, exhibited, and given away to the public over the course of the roughly six-month exhibition.[6][7][8]

Thinking About Flying was a project at Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (2011) and Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2012) in which homing pigeons roosted in a pigeon loft on the museum roof and museum visitors were invited to take home a pigeon and release it. Upon releasing the pigeon from museum visitors' homes, the pigeon would fly back to the museum, and the cycle could repeat. Pigeons traveled distances increasing from a few blocks to over 400 miles. Over the one year duration of the project over 1000 people took and released pigeons from their homes.[9][10] In an interview in Sculpture Magazine, Rubin said of the project, "Releasing the pigeons took an interesting act of faith. Once they’re out of your view, you’re left to imagine their flight back to the museum. They were housed in an old backyard pigeon loft that I modified into a misfit mirror of the museum’s Modernist architecture. That became the physical metaphor for the whole project: How do you map a space that hovers between a home and an institution?"[11]

The Last Billboard (2010–present), is a 36 foot long rooftop billboard located on the corner of Highland and Baum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The letters on the billboard are changed by hand, and each month Rubin invites someone else to create the text for the public billboard. The billboard has featured writers, artists, and children, including Laure Prouvost, Nina Katchadourian, Steve Lambert, Pablo Helguera, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Michael Crowe, Matt Shain, Maude Liotta, Micah Lexier, Kim Beck, Sarah Keeling, Marc Horowitz, Lenka Clayton, Joshua Beckman, David Horvitz, Anthony Discenza, Alisha B. Wormsley, and Packard Jennings.[12][13]

The Last Billboard, a project by artist Jon Rubin, featured a text by Laure Prouvost in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, November 2017.

In March 2018, a text by artist Alisha B. Wormsley stating "THERE ARE BLACK PEOPLE IN THE FUTURE" was removed after several weeks of display. According to statement by Rubin on April 3, 2018, originally posted to the project website, “Last week, The Last Billboard’s landlord, We Do Property, forced Alisha’s text to be taken down over objections to the content (through a never-before evoked clause in the lease that gives the landlord the right to approve text).”[14] Wormsley published her own statement about the incident, saying "However you might feel, whatever you might think, THERE ARE BLACK PEOPLE IN THE FUTURE. Finally, this text is a sentence I do not own, it is for anyone who wants to use it. Please. Take it."[15] Since Wormsley's text was removed, the billboard has remained empty of text.

...circle through New York (2017), for which the full title is A talking parrot, a high school drama class, a Punjabi TV show, the oldest song in the world, a museum artwork, and a congregation's call to action circle through New York, was a project in collaboration with artist Lenka Clayton commissioned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. In this project, from March 1 to August 31, 2017, six very different sites and communities participated in a complex system of exchange. The Guggenheim Museum (Upper East Side), Saint Philip's Church (Harlem), Pet Resources (South Bronx), Frank Sinatra School for the Arts (Queens), Jus Broadcasting (Queens), and the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (Upper East Side), each with their own communities and audiences, were the participating institutions. The six organizations all lie along an imaginary circle drawn across the city. After extensive research, Clayton and Rubin selected one component from each location, as referenced in the title. For example, the talking parrot was selected from the Pet Resources in the South Bronx, while a museum artwork was selected from the Guggenheim Museum.[16][17] The artwork on loan from the Guggenheim was Félix González-Torres's sculpture "Untitled" (Public Opinion) (1991).[18] ...circle through New York was commissioned as part of the Guggenheim Social Practice initiative.[19]

For the 9th Shanghai Biennale in 2012, Rubin purchased an entire estate sale from a Pittsburgh family and shipped every item to Shanghai and hosted the estate sale during the exhibition. Once in Shanghai, the roughly 3000 items were arranged in the same way as the original estate sale. Visitors to the exhibition could purchase items from the estate sale and take them home immediately. Over the course of the exhibition, the items were slowly purchased, disappearing from the exhibition until on the last day the entire estate sale had been purchased. The items in the sale included furniture, a toy train set, plastic figurines, jewelry, and a dishwasher to more personal artifacts, including photo albums, a marriage certificate, personal files and hundreds of religious books written by a priest in the family. As the press release pointed out, "notably, many of the objects in the estate were originally manufactured in China."[20][21]

In an interview in Sculpture Magazine, Rubin said, "I wanted to look at how we culturally and economically fabricate what is foreign by colliding the consumer residue of an American family with the new psychology of state capitalism in China. At its core, The Lovasik Estate Sale was a portrait of a family and, to a greater extent, of the socio-economics of death in the United States. We create a second consumer body through a lifetime of slow accumulation, and then suddenly we die and the body sits there, untethered from its owner. How did it all become so meaningless? What’s to be done with it?"[11]

Created in Pittsburgh, PA, in a corner storefront, The Waffle Shop (Talk Show) was a functioning restaurant from 2009 to 2013, and allowed local residents to host a talk show in the restaurant during all open hours. The talk shows streamed live. Through this venue, strangers could participate in unscripted performance with each other in front of a live audience of diners and online viewers.

The ISA (2004-2006) was a free and experimental art school that operated for two years in San Francisco, California. It offered no accreditation nor did it have a physical location. The school operated using a barter system (students traded labor hours for school) and remained nomadic until its conclusion. The barter system made explicit the contract and exchange between students and teachers. The barter system also helped the school incorporate a more diverse student body than traditional schools. The ISA group realized several events and exhibitions as a group including The Black Market Auction, The Show and Tell, and others. A list of tenants for the school on Rubin's website includes "Runs completely outside of an institutional framework (no grant-funding, no academic or artworld affiliations)" and "The ISA is open to students of all ages and levels of experience, creating a situation of shared one-room-schoolhouse learning and mentorship."[22]

The Speech of the Swans (2011) was a collaborative project with artist Dawn Weleski, created for the 8th Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Each Sunday of the exhibition, actors hired to portray then United States President Barack Obama and then Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez gave rides in swan-shaped pedal boats in a lake in an Porto Alegre park. The swan boats, usually a playful or romantic activity for leisure or tourists, included the corresponding countries' presidential seals. While riding members of the public around in the boats, the actors asked participants "What do you really think of me?", and later incorporated answers from the public into speeches that wrestled with the issues brought to the surface. Because the speeches were sourced from the public, they were complex and allowed the figureheads to represent themselves as conflicted. Transcripts of the speeches are available on Rubin's personal site.[23]

9th Street Stock Exchange (2016) took place in an Italian market in Philadelphia. Rubin collaborated with eight participating stores of various socio-economic backgrounds, including more established businesses and newer stores by recent immigrants to the area. Over eight weeks, the eight businesses sold and displayed selected merchandise from each other stores, with stock rotating weekly. For example, a selection of pulp romance novels from Molly's Books and Records, rotated weekly to each of the other seven stores. Alejandra Boutique rotated their selection of women's jeans on mannequin legs to each of the other stores.

As Nato Thompson describes in his essay about the project, "First, a diverse set of businesses on both the North and South sides of the market are identified. Then each shop owner is approached with a series of conversations. Finally, one object for sale in their store is chosen to be exchanged and sold each week by a neighboring business. After seven weeks, there will have been seven different objects made available in each store, with 56 total juxtapositions for a visitor to see over that time. The money made from each sale goes back to the original store-owner whose objects were sold. This simple formula (which admittedly was not so simple to put into action) has a series of parts that become evident as one walks along ninth-street." Thompson continues, "The 9th Street Stock Exchange took a marketplace as its canvas and worked with the given environment to produce an altered set of social relationships. Rather than wondering if it is art or not, or whether or not it is beautiful, it is perhaps more helpful to consider what this intervention opens up for us in our own imaginations. What other collaborations are possible? What new forms of business? Can we imagine other kinds of market places? In asking these questions, we gain insight into how we can collectively shape the world we live in."[24] The project was funded by Mural Arts Philadelphia and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.[25]

Never Been To Tehran was a participatory project co-organized with Andrea Grover which involved contributions from various individuals who have never been to Tehran. These participants have taken photographs (from their home base) of what they imagine Tehran to look like. They then uploaded their photos each day to an online photo-sharing website. These photos were then projected as a slideshow simultaneously in galleries and public spaces around the world (including Tehran). "Anything that anyone might take a photograph of is fair game, just as long as it feels like Tehran." According to the project website, "As Tehran's image is regularly depicted in the dominant media, it is a compelling challenge for the participants in this exhibition to sift through the glut of images and information to cull out a personally constructed version of an unfamiliar place.”[26]