Rita McBride

Rita McBride (born 1960) is an American artist and sculptor. She is based in Los Angeles and Düsseldorf. Alongside her artistic practice, McBride is a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and served as its director until 2017. McBride is married to Glen Rubsamen, an American painter from Los Angeles.
Working at the intersection of architecture, design, and public space, McBride is known for her large scale works and installations, with her wider oeuvre incorporating performance, texts, and smaller scale sculptural work.
Life
Rita McBride was born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1960. She received her BA from Bard College in New York in 1982 and her MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 1987, where she studied with Michael Asher and John Baldessari. After receiving her MFA, McBride began to exhibit her work widely initially with art galleries in Porto and Los Angeles. Her work has been the subject of more than seventy one-person exhibitions and twenty monographs.
Work and commissions
McBride’s practice is concerned not only with sculptural or architectural form, but likewise the situations and happenings which arise in the audience’s relation to the works. Her most exhibited work, Arena (1997), for instance, is a modular structure which is assembled into a concave, arena-like seating area. First shown at the Witte de With in Rotterdam, Arena is activated by a calendar of programming curated by McBride and the host institution which range from lectures and artist talks to performance pieces by guest artists. McBride is the editor and co-author of a series of collaborative novels entitled Ways, each of which engage with a particular literary subgenre.
Major public commissions include Particulates, Dia Art Foundation, New York; Obelisk of Tutankhamum, Cologne, Germany (2017); Donkey’s Way, Moenchengladbach (2016); Artifacts (C.W.D), P.S. 315, Queens, New York (2015); Bells and Whistles, The New School, New York, (2014).
Mae West (2011), one of McBride's most known public works, is a 52-meter tall carbon structure in Munich. Built for the Effnerplatz, a hub for public and private transit in eastern Munich, it remarkably includes access for a tram line to run through its latticed base. Mae West caused a number of debates within the city. The sculpture and its reception by the residents of the area is the subject of Day After Day, a film by Alexander Hick.
Selected exhibitions
Selected solo exhibitions
2017-18: Particulates, Dia:Chelsea, New York
2017: Rita McBride: Explorer, Wiels, Brussels
2015-16: gesellschaft, kestnergesellschaft/Kunsthalle Düsseldorf
2014: Public Tilt, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
2013-14: Public Transaction, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City
2012: Public Tender, Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Spain
2010: Previously, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland
2008: Public Works, Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany
2008: Some Settlements, Konrad Fischer Galerie, Düsseldorf
2007: Rita McBride, Galleria Alfonso Artiaco, Naples
2004: Exhibition, SculptureCenter, Long Island City, New York
2002: Naked Came the Stranger, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz
2000: Her House with the Upstairs in It, Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Galerie (DAAD), Berlin
1999: Aloof and Incidental, Annemarie Verna Galerie and Mai 36 Galerie, Zürich
1997: The Donkey’s Way and Piggybackback (in collaboration with Catherine Opie and Lawrence Weiner), Galeria Pedro Oliveira, Porto
1997: Hyperinclusion, OSMOS, Berlin
1997: Rita McBride, Alexander and Bonin, New York
1997: Arena & National Chain, Witte de With, Rotterdam
1994: Backsliding, sideslipping, one Great Leap and the “forbidden”, Michael Klein Gallery, New York
1990: Rita McBride New Work, Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles
1989: Rita McBride, Galeria Atlântica. Porto
Selected group exhibitions
2017-18: Studio for Propositional Cinema | in relationship to a Spectator, kestenergesellschaft, Hannover
2016: EVERYTHING ARCHITECTURE, BOZAR, Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels
2016: Liverpool Biennial 2016
2011: Making Is Thinking, Witte de With, Rotterdam
2007: The World as a Stage, Tate Modern, London and Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
2003: Living Inside the Grid, New Museum, New York
2002: Taipei Biennial 2002: Great Theatre of the World, Taipei Fine Art Museum
2000: What If: Art on the Verge of Architecture and Design, Moderna Museet, Stockholm
1998: Where: Allegories of Site in Contemporary Art, Whitney Museum of American Art at Champion, Stamford, CT
1994: Breakdown, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego
1991: There's no There, There, Indianapolis Museum of Art
Collections
Ellipse Foundation, Alcoitão/Cascais
Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona
Bundeskunstsammlung Zeitgenössischer Kunst, Bonn
The Art Institute of Chicago
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Des Moines Art Center, Iowa
FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf
Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung, Hannover
San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
De Vleeshal, Middelburg, Netherlands
Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach
New York Public Library
Queens Museum of Art, New York
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Neues Museum, Nuremberg
FRAC Île-de-France, Paris
Museu de Serralves, Porto
Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam
The Achenbach Foundation, San Francisco
De Young Museum, San Francisco
Legion of Honor, San Francisco
Kunstmuseum St. Gallen
De Pont Foundation for Contemporary Art, Tilburg
Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz
Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne
Wake Forest University Collection, Winston-Salem, North Carolina
Kunstmuseum Winterthur
Kunsthaus Zürich
Bibliography
Rita McBride: Public Works, 1988 – 2015. Texts by Gina Ashcraft, Gregor Jansen, Mark von Schlegell, Susanne Titz, and Christina Végh. Hannover, Kestner Gesellschaft; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Cologne; Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2016
Fernández-Galiano, Luis, Mark Wigley, Bartomeu Marí and Anne Pöhlmann. Rita McBride. Oferta pública / Public Tender. Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), 2012
Schwarz, Dieter, Daniel Kurjakovic, and Iris Wien. Previously. Winterthur: Kunstmuseum Winterthur, 2010
McBride, Rita. Explorer. London: Occasional Papers, 2018
References
External links
Official Website
McBride at Alexander and Bonin
1960 births
Living people
Artists from Des Moines, Iowa
American women sculptors
Sculptors from Iowa
21st-century American women artists
21st-century American sculptors
20th-century American women artists
20th-century American sculptors
Academic staff of Kunstakademie Düsseldorf
American women academics