Local artist Lydia Rubio has occupied a studio on Warren Street for about a year. After considering her financial future in the wake of COVID-19, she recently decided to create a studio at home and move her gallery digital, showing at the online Davis Orton Gallery this summer.
“The idea of going digital is great, and even main galleries are doing it, right?” Rubio said. “It will free the art world from old rules and it will eventually help a lot of artists. It is like a new age… it’s a change that might benefit everyone.”
Rubio has been using this time to work on an abstract series called “Encounters,” which she hangs in her living room on the “Pandemic Wall.”
“It’s about struggle — the struggle of exterior forces and a stable rectangle,” Rubio said. “In a sense, it’s a contrast of elements, isolation versus activity, movement versus static.”
Rubio said she feels lucky to have the creative work to do, otherwise she doesn’t know how she would handle isolation.
Interactive paintings performance at the Lumberyard, Catskill NY. 9. 15. 2019. Exhibition of five large format paintings on panel related to environmental issues in the Hudson River. The public was invited to participate in a sequence of erasures and redrawing of the works including references to the sites painted by Frederick Church and Thomas Cole, to evidence the urgency to stop the destruction of nature.
The Artful Book exhibition. Cover handmade by artist 16 x 11 inches, wood panels and linen.
Alphabet Series Keynote presentation Click here images and PDF of the book “Alphabet of Invisible Islands” 1998 and the boxes associated with it. Exhibition curated by Barbara Young November 2 to January 4th 2019. Visit www.lnsgallery.com
CENTER OF BOOK ARTS NYC
Opening October 3 – 14
Artist talk December 5th
Journals of Cuba, India and Patagonia. See complete journals videos here.
The Traveling Artist: Journals by Lydia Rubio
This exhibition features artistic documentation of artist Lydia Rubio’s travel narratives across linguistic and geographic landscapes. A multiple series of work including, The Genius Loci Book ( Colombia ), Journal of a Trip to the Island ( Cuba ), and Travel Journals from India, Patagonia, Geneva, and Morocco. The works record the artist’s experiences across a variety of calligraphic, drawing and poetic compositions.
Quotes on books
Adriana Herrera
“Lydia Rubio has succeeded in bringing into contemporary art the highest expression of the travel diary in a medium such as an artist’s book, the genesis of which takes us back to the Middle Ages. Her books are iconic: they are exquisite and freely imaginative, much like the drawings done by copyists on margins and, at the same time, are linked to the crossings of endless territories, from real topographies of the places she has lived to immersions in the diverse times of the history of art.”
“Lydia Rubio‘s Travel Journals are a result of an early appreciation for words and calligraphy. In the 1980s, her practice began to incorporate her fascination with to poets, the act of drawing, the life behind lines and gestures, and the sensual qualities of paper into the medium of the artist’s book. For Rubio, these books are the field where a free stream of thoughts meets the planner of strategist.”
“Lydia Rubio’s Travel Journals are an artistic documentation of the artist’s travel narratives across linguistic and geographic landscapes. The works record the artist’s experiences across a variety of calligraphic, drawing and poetic compositions. This exhibition includes multiple series of work including The Genius Loci Book, Journal of a Trip to the Island, and Travel Journals.”
“The Genius Loci Book 2014, documents the artist trips in Colombia during her extended residence, with notes, maps, watercolors and quotes from A Von Humboldt, Frederick Church, Goethe about landscape and art. The Journal of a Trip to the Island documents the artist’s trip to Cuba in 1999 and contains the studies for works that were later executed after returning to the studio. The works represent her reaction against the extremely visual and verbal turbulence within today’s world. Of them, Rubio says, “in them, I look for refuge, retreat into self, silence.” Continuing this work today, her studio practice is an ongoing investigation of nature and representation in painting: imagined or perceived, the abstract or the real simulated.”
View Video of interaction with ALOSA SAPIDISSIMA
This exhibition in the TSL Gallery deals with issues of racism, environmental, economic inequality, access to health care, LGBTQ and women’s rights, gender equality, voter suppression, political and economic issues, dark money and political corruption, MAGA, The Wall / ICE, Dogwhistling, police violence, and more. Arte4a is a collaboration between Pauline Decarmo and George Spencer working in the visual arts, radio interviews, and curating exhibitions. September 1 to 29th at TSL Hudson, NY
Protest Art Exhibition at TSL- Time and Space Limited
WGXC Public Radio interview with George Spencer and Pauline Decarmo. Early life in Cuba, family background, education, visual perception, architecture and art, teaching, philosophy behind the works. 2019
A 4 minute video about artistic approach and recent paintings. Produced by MCS Photo Space May 2018 at studio in The Fountainhead, Miami FL.
The Ellies Award, October 2018
My upcoming new project is funded by The Ellies, Miami’s visual arts awards, presented by ArtCenter/South Florida.
This grant is to be used “To support the creation of a series of large-scale interactive erasable works about the impermanence of our ecological systems affected by pollution and global warming ”
Puerto Rico-Colombia Exhibition at The Clemente Center, 117 Suffolk Street, NY, NY November 2018
Map of Pathways, acrylic on canvas 94 x 64 inches.
ArtonCuba Fall 2018, “Seeking Silence” profile of recent work by Hortensia Montero
Oil on panel 2017
30 x 30 x 2 inches
Lydia Rubio (Havana, 1946) is a multidisciplinary artist who has received international recognition and has established herself in the United States since 1960. She has traveled extensively through Europe and Latin America (…). She currently lives in Miami. She has a Master’s in Architecture from the School of Design of Harvard University and a BA in Architecture from the University of Florida and has carried out studies in the Università degli Studi, Florence, Italy. She has been a professor in the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Parsons School of Design and in the University of Puerto Rico.
She emerges as a professional artist in 1980 and her multidisciplinary works stand out for the use of words together with images, in paintings and installations, architecturally integrated through panels carried out with mastery, acuteness and excellent execution.
The profile of her visual repertoire is based on a research on the imagined or perceived representation of nature, artistically expressed as a result of the visibility of the union of the real and the symbolic, which is the central point of her aesthetic proposal. (…) Her aesthetic discourse is connected with Russian constructivism and the Cuban and Brazilian concrete art movement, which had an influence on her artistic style. [ READ MORE ENGLISH / SPANISH ]
image to publish Constellation # 9 oil on panel 30 x 30 x 2 inches