Persisting Matters: An Artist Talk Series – Tammie Rubin in conversation with Ellen Tani

Please join us for a new episode in this series of encounters and conversations with contemporary artists, this time with Tammie Rubin and Ellen Tani.

Persisting Matters is a series of talks that places contemporary artists in conversation with scholars, curators, critics, and the public. The series is developed in the context of CIMA’s 2023-2024 exhibition, Transatlantic Bridges: Corrado Cagli, 1938-1948 (October 12, 2023 – January 27, 2024), and supported by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Cagli saw his artistic practice as a tool for anti-rhetorical resistance and critique to power in times of exile, displacement and trauma. Questions of gender, racism, political oppression and resilience through art and community practices were central to his work in the years of his exile from Italy, due to the country’s racial laws. Persisting Matters engages contemporary artists, whose practices explore these pressing subjects in their individual context and prism.

Tammie Rubin is a ceramic sculptor and installation artist whose practice considers the intrinsic power of objects and coded symbols as signifiers, wishful contraptions, and mythic relics. Her artwork weaves together familial, historical, and literary narratives of Black American citizenry, migration, autonomy, and faith. Rubin has received residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Penland School of Craft, and Pottery Northwest. She is the 2022 Tito’s Prize winner and a 2024 USA Fellow in Craft.

Rubin exhibits widely; selections include Project Row Houses, Houston, TX; the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; AGBS Christian-Green Gallery at the University of Texas at Austin, Mulvane Art Museum, KS; George Washington Carver Museum, Austin, TX; Indianapolis Art Center, Indianapolis, IN; The Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, TX; Women & Their Work Gallery, Austin, TX; Rivalry Projects, Buffalo, NY; and Ruiz-Healy Art, San Antonio, TX. Rubin is represented by Galleri Urbane, Dallas, TX., and C24 Gallery, New York, NY.

Rubin’s artwork has received reviews in online and print publications such as Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, Oxford American, Art in America, Glasstire, Austin Chronicle, Sightlines, fields, Conflict of Interest, Arts and Culture Texas, and Ceramics: Art & Perception. She is a member of ICOSA Collective, a non-profit cooperative gallery. Born and raised in Chicago, Rubin lives in Austin, Texas, where she is an Associate Professor of Ceramics & Sculpture at St. Edward’s University.

Ellen Tani is an art historian and curator whose research in the history of modern and contemporary art is informed by feminist, critical race, and disability theory. She is currently Assistant Professor of Art History at Rochester Institute of Technology. A collaborator at heart, she co-developed the AREA Code Art Fair in Boston I 2020, and has held curatorial positions at the ICA Boston and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Most recently, she co-curated the exhibition RETROaction in 2024 with Charles Gaines, Kate Fowle, and Homi Bhabha at the New York and Los Angeles locations of Hauser & Wirth Gallery. Her research has been supported by the Clark Research and Academic Program, the Getty Research Institute, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University, and the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African and African American Studies at the University of Virginia. Her scholarship has appeared in Art Journal, Panorama, and American Quarterly, and her current book manuscript explores the career of conceptual artist Charles Gaines.