Photo by SJ Williams.

Lydia Rubio is a multidisciplinary visual artist. Born in Cuba and raised in Puerto Rico, she is the third generation of women painters in her family. Her 45-year studio practice started in New York City. Previously based in Miami and Bogota, since 2018 she lives in Hudson, New York. Her work consists of paintings, unique journals and site-specific installations. Painting is at the core of her practice, primarily based on a conceptual system, not a fixed style.

Rubio has completed large-scale public art commissions of metal sculptures and floor designs: the Gates of Earth and Air at the Raleigh Durham Airport, and for Miami Dade County, the Gates of Love, Wisdom and Courage at the Women’s Park and an installation of paintings, sculptures, and text, All Night Long, We Heard Birds Passing, at the Carnival Cruise Terminals, Port of Miami.

Her work has been exhibited internationally in over thirty solo shows and ninety group shows. They include a two person show at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and a solo at The Center for Book Arts in New York and The Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale. Group exhibitions include the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, Art Museum of the Americas Washington DC, Museum of Latin American Art Long Beach CA, Frost Art Museum and Boca Raton Museum of Art in Florida, Snite Museum of Art, Indiana, Lehigh University, Pittsburg, and Pratt Manhattan Gallery. Her works are in the permanent collections at The Lowe Museum of Art, the Eskenazi Museum, the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, Stanford University, Bryn Mawr College, the University of Southern California and many private collections in Austria, Canada, Colombia, Switzerland, and the USA.

Rubio holds a Master of Architecture from Harvard University, Graduate School of Design, a Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture from the University of Florida; and Urban Design Studies, Universita Degli Studi; School of Architecture, Florence, Italy.  Her extensive experience derived from studies with Rudolf Arnheim, Jerzy Soltan and Leonardo Ricci, and understanding of the constructive and poetic qualities of architecture and the visual arts, has resulted in spatially successful public art installations and a distinctive approach to painting. A ten-year design and art teaching experience includes Parsons School of Design, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and the University of Puerto Rico, School of Architecture.

Rubio has been awarded a Tree of Life, the Ellies Oolite Creatives Award, a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, a Cintas Fellowship Award, a State of Florida Artist Award, a Miami-Dade Community Foundation Grant, and a Graham Foundation Grant.

Writer and scholar, Enrico M. Santi, wrote in 2015, in an essay for Review Magazine, “For the past thirty-five years, the artist Lydia Rubio has worked with an overall premise: art is a mystery whose solution can be as desirable as it is elusive. Rubio proceeds like a postmodern Gnostic, intent on pursuing dispersed clues of a hermetic secret and organizing themes according to a formal strategy of fragments, structured in series that spawn paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints—duly accompanied by diaries, maps, notes, even doodles.”

Emir Rodriguez Monegal, a major literary critic and scholar wrote in response to Rubio’s exhibition in 1985 at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, “An art of illusion and of obsession which is both calligraphically lucid and elusive. Borges once said: The esthetic phenomenon is the imminence of a revelation which does not occur. In these paintings and drawings we are nearer than we will ever be to that revelation.”

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