The PAD award for achievement in the field of public art is given annually to an individual whose contributions have greatly influenced public art practice. This year PAD is proud to present the award to Ben Rubin.
Rubin is a media artist based in New York City. His work is featured in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the San Jose Museum of Art; and the Science Museum, London. He has exhibited at the Whitney Museum in New York; the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid; the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris, and the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. Rubin has created large-scale public artworks for the New York Times, the City of San José, and the Minneapolis Public Library. He is currently developing a site-specific sculpture titled Shakespeare Machine for the Public Theater in New York and has just completed Beacon (2010), a luminous rooftop sculpture commissioned for the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia.
Rubin has worked closely with important figures in contemporary culture including: Steve Reich, Diller+Scofidio/Renfro, Renzo Piano, James Polshek, James Sanders, Laurie Anderson, Arto Lindsay, Bruno Latour, Paul Virilio, Ann Hamilton and Beryl Korot. He frequently collaborates with UCLA statistician Mark Hansen; their collaborative projects include Moveable Type (2007), and Listening Post (2002), which won the 2004 Golden Nica Prize from Ars Electronica, as well as a Webby award in 2003. In 2011, Rubin and Mark Hansen will join forces with the Elevator Repair Service theater ensemble to present Shuffle, a new performance and installation that will re-mix text from three American novels of the 1920s.
Mr. Rubin received a B.A. at Brown University in 1987, and an M.S. at the MIT Media Lab in 1989. Mr. Rubin is on the faculty of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU and he has previously taught at the Bard MFA program and the Yale School of Art, where he was appointed critic in graphic design in 2004. During the Fall of 2010, he taught a new graduate seminar, “An Anecdotal History of Sound,” at NYU/ITP.