Place - We are tethered to it by way of family, culture, myth, personal stories,biorhythms, land. These are some of the tenuous threads that bind us to our home. These strands can be broken by war, cultural displacement, divorce, natural disaster. As an artist, I try to reweave these sticky broken threads.

Meridel Rubenstein mixes mediums and metaphors to make art about our tenuous connection to place. Originally trained as a photographer, she combines disparate materials such as earthy palladium prints with cold steel mounts, transparent photographic imagery with imagery sandblasted into glass, video imagery projected onto cast glass, and digital still imagery on floating vellum and hand-coated tree bark papers. A sense of fragility, transparency, and passage, in her works, underscores a possibility for change. Her complex narrative photoworks and installations derive from a sense of place, personal and collective history as well as myth — the precarious landscape of the cultural mind.

In more recent work, like Joan’s Arc/Vietnam, she uses Vietnam and the American war as a mirror for different ideas in the east and west about nature/ body /place / forgiveness.   Large luminous digital prints on handcoated paper combine with video projections and objects in wood and sandblasted glass.

Meridel Rubenstein maintains art studios in Vermont and in New Mexico. She has been an active arts educator for over 25 years,  presently she is a Senior Fellow at the new School  of Art, Design, and Media at Nanyang University in Singapore. From 1990-95 she was  the Harnish Visiting Artist at Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts. She has created photography programs at the College of Santa Fe and the Institute of American Indian Arts in New Mexico and directed the Photography Program at San Francisco State University in California, the oldest Master of Fine Arts program in the USA. 

She has exhibited widely including the 1st SITE Santa Fe International Biennial, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, and The List Center for the Visual Arts at MIT in Cambridge as well as in numerous gallery and traveling exhibitions. Her works are in prominent collections including the National Museum of American Art in Washington, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, Germany.

Meridel Rubenstein has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Bunting Institute at Harvard University, awards from the National Endowment of the Arts, as well as the Pollock Krasner and the Rockefeller Foundations. She was educated at Sarah Lawrence College in New York and did special graduate studies at M.I.T. with the eminent photographer, Minor White. She received an M.A. and M.F.A. from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, in 1974 and 1977, where she studied with noted art and photography historian and museum directors Beaumont Newhall and Van Deren Coke.

In October 2004, BELONGING: Los Alamos to Vietnam,  Photoworks and Installations , was published by St. Ann’s Press. This major monograph of twenty years of her work, includes texts by acclaimed environmental writer Terry Tempest Williams, noted theorist Elaine Scarry, and reknown art writers James Crump, Lucy Lippard, and Rebecca Solnit. Solnit, has written of Rubenstein:

...a consummate maker of metaphors, an artist who can never talk about only one thing at a time, but speaks of things in relationship, of lives to landscapes, of corporeal location and homing in terms of labyrinths and minotaurs, of bombs in terms of other myths, of physicists in relationship to pueblos.

back