The Rubell Family Art Gallery Exhibition - December, 2

RUBELL FAMILY COLLECTION ANNOUNCES UPCOMING EXHIBITION

Beg Borrow and Steal
 
Exhibition to include 74 artists from the Rubell Family Collection
December 2, 2009 – May 29, 2010

The Rubell Family Collection is pleased to announce their upcoming exhibition Beg Borrow and Steal.  This exhibition will feature seventy-four artists.  It will occupy all 28 galleries at the 45,000 sq ft museum and will be accompanied by a large-format 272-page catalog.

In 2005 the Rubells had a series of conversations with artists Kelly Walker and Wade Guyton, who talked about the generosity of some artists in the nature of their work.  Walker and Guyton described how artists like Cady Noland, Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp and Richard Prince opened doors for other artists like themselves to walk through.  The Rubells had never heard that opinion expressed as honestly before.   This show was borne out of those conversations, and its title comes from a quote attributed to Picasso: “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”  While the question of artistic influence may not be new, what artists choose to borrow or steal, and from whom, is distinct in that it becomes a reflection of their own time.  Beg Borrow and Steal presents artists’ attempts to build on the legacies of their predecessors as they present their own new ideas. Art about art and “stolen” imagery has fueled many an artist’s production, and this exhibition contains numerous landmark examples by internationally renowned contemporary artists.

Rubell Family Statement: Our Process
Every show at the Rubell Family Collection is comprised entirely of work we own, and it is inevitably new acquisitions that provide the inspiration for these exhibits.  The more recent work forces us to look at the rest of the collection in a new context, establishing new dialogues between artworks that we then make visible in the mounting of the exhibition.  Usually, by the time we’ve traced a particular aesthetic, conceptual or social thread through to the late ‘60’s, where our collection begins, and beyond, we have gained a deeper understanding of the new work, its critical underpinnings, and its context in art history.

Today, something new is happening, and its meaning is not immediately evident to us.  We know it has something to do with appropriation – of style, images, strategies, techniques, forms – in a way that is utterly different from the appropriation that preceded it: Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Sherrie Levine, Jeff Koons, Cady Noland, Richard Prince.  Many of the newer group of artists deal with the multi-layered, explosively dense quality of the Internet and aspects of what has come to be known as Web 2.0 culture.  We do not believe, however, that this new work simply reflects our current technological and social reality.

The most interesting contemporary art almost always engages with a future that is not yet known, and we believe this new work is dealing with that future.  The same way Andy Warhol predicted our current culture of fame, artists today are working around something we are just beginning to understand.  It has to do with information overload, time, the collapse of time, indistinct authorship, virtuality and intense individuality.  In the future, there might be a simple explanation, but for the moment it is a glorious mess of things.

In this exhibition, we have 260 works by 74 artists of different generations.  As collectors, we feel privileged to embrace that which is new or feels new and to put it into an art historical context we can identify.  Critics, curators, scholars and time will bring form and a deeper understanding to this, but we are thrilled to be here now. Through 45 years of collecting, the present has always been our greatest inspiration.

The following is a complete list of artists included in the exhibition:
Ai Weiwei
John Baldessari
Frank Benson
Amy Bessone
Matthew Brannon
Maurizio Cattelan
Peter Coffin
George Condo
Aaron Curry
John Dogg
Marcel Duchamp
Gardar Eide Einarsson
Elmgreen & Dragset
Hans-Peter Feldmann
Urs Fischer
Dan Flavin
Robert Gober
Aneta Grzeszykowska
Wade Guyton
Guyton \ Walker
Karl Haendel
Peter Halley
David Hammons
Mark Handforth
Keith Haring
Rachel Harrison
Richard Hawkins
Damien Hirst
Jenny Holzer
Jonathan Horowitz
Thomas Houseago
Rashid Johnson
William E. Jones
Deborah Kass
Mike Kelley
Jeff Koons
Barbara Kruger
Jim Lambie
Elad Lassry
Louise Lawler
Mark Leckey
Sherrie Levine
Li Zhanyang
Glenn Ligon
Robert Longo
Nate Lowman
Nathan Mabry
Kris Martin
Paul McCarthy
Allan McCollum
Adam McEwen
Takashi Murakami
Cady Noland
David Noonan
Richard Prince
Charles Ray
Jason Rhoades
Stephen G. Rhodes
Bert Rodriguez
Sterling Ruby
Thomas Ruff
David Salle
Steven Shearer
Cindy Sherman
Haim Steinbach
John Stezaker
Philip Taaffe
Hank Willis Thomas
Piotr Uklanski
Meyer Vaisman
Kelley Walker
Wang Ziwei
Andy Warhol
Christopher Wool
Zhang Huan

Exhibition Sponsor:

Opening breakfast: Thursday, Dec 3rd, 2009, 9am to 12pm
Hours during Art Basel: Wednesday, Dec 2nd through Tuesday, Dec 8th, 2009, 9am to 6pm
Regular hours: Wednesday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm
 
About the Rubell Family Collection and the Contemporary Arts Foundation
 
The Rubell Family Collection is one of the leading collections of contemporary art in the world. Started in 1964, soon after Don and Mera Rubell were married, the collecting group expanded some years later when their children Jason and Jennifer, then quite young, joined their parents in acquiring art. Jason’s wife, Michelle, is the latest addition to this collaborative effort. The family’s extensive collection of works dates from the 1960s to the present.

In 1994, the Rubell family founded the Contemporary Arts Foundation (CAF), a 501(c)(3) non-profit located in the Wynwood Art District in downtown Miami, Florida. Open to the public since 1996, the CAF and Rubell Family Collection are housed in a converted 45,000-square-foot former Drug Enforcement Agency confiscated-goods facility. The museum features twenty-seven galleries, a sculpture garden, a research library with over 40,000 volumes including rare texts and periodicals, a film and lecture theatre, and a bookstore.

CAF believes that great works of art are an intrinsically transcendent, elevating, liberating and empowering force, and that the artifacts of our time are the legacy of society as a whole. Based on this premise, the Foundation seeks to prompt social intercourse and debate, an essential freedom of a democratic society, by sharing with the world the physical, sensual and intellectual properties of contemporary art.

CAF advances public interaction at the Rubell Family Collection by presenting works from the collection of the Rubell family in rotating, curated exhibitions with accompanying documentation, as well as through a variety of educational and community outreach programs. CAF commissions new works of art and produces traveling exhibitions, which are presented throughout the world. In addition, CAF operates as a lending resource for curators and museums.

Rubell Family Collection
95 NW 29th Street, Miami, FL 33127
T: +1(305)573-6090   F: +1(305)573-6023
info@rfc.museum 
Press contact: Tanya Selvaratnam
T: +1(917)754-4179   pr@rfc.museum