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.[1] 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.[2] 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.[3] McBride is the editor and co-author of a series of collaborative novels entitled Ways, each of which engage with a particular literary subgenre.[4]
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).[5]
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.[3][6] The sculpture and its reception by the residents of the area is the subject of Day After Day, a film by Alexander Hick.
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 ISBN978-3-86335-850-1
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 ISBN978-84-92505-62-3
Schwarz, Dieter, Daniel Kurjakovic, and Iris Wien. Previously. Winterthur: Kunstmuseum Winterthur, 2010
