The National Museum
How does a nation or city or neighborhood decide what to collectively remember? Who gets to decide what museums’ collect, display and commemorate and what role can artists have in this conversation? The National Museum critically and creatively engages with the notion of museum as a malleable medium--an institution where an imagined set of social agreements, stories of the past, and visions of the future are constructed in and with the public. Taking the form of a signage on an empty storefront space, the work will consist of the opening phrase “The National Museum of” and will be modified every few months by an invited artist selected by the project’s founder Jon Rubin in consultation with an advisory board consisting of Anastasia James, Director of Curatorial, Pittsburgh Cultural Trust; Paola Santoscoy, Director of the El Eco Experimental Museum in Mexico City; Joseph del Pesco, International Director of KADIST; and Sean Beauford, Pittsburgh-based curator, educator, and writer.
The National Museum of Broken Treaties
Walid Raad (b. 1967 Chbanieh, Lebanon) with a written response by Jalal Toufic
June - September 2024
Walid Raad is, in part, an artist and a Professor of Art at The Cooper Union and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Photography at Bard College (2023–2024). The list of exhibitions (good, bad, and mediocre ones); awards and grants (merited, not merited, grateful for, rejected, and/or returned); education (some of it thought-provoking, some of it less so); publications (Raad is fond of some of my books, but more so of the books of Jalal Toufic. Learn more about the artist.
Jalal Toufic is a thinker and a mortal to death. He was born in 1962 in Beirut or Baghdad and died before dying in 1989 in Evanston, Illinois. He is the author of more than ten books, among which are What Was I Thinking? (e-flux journal-Sternberg Press, 2017), The Dancer’s Two Bodies (Sharjah Art Foundation, 2015), and Forthcoming (2nd ed., e-flux journal-Sternberg Press, 2014). Many, if not all, of his books, some of which were published by Forthcoming Books, continue to be forthcoming even after their publication. He has made over ten films, which include essay films and conceptual films; short films, feature length films, and “inhumanely” long films (72 hours, 50 hours); films that he shot and films in which all the images are from movies by other directors (Hitchcock, Sokurov, Bergman, etc.). His films and artworks have been shown at the 6th, 10th, and 11th Sharjah Biennials; the 9th Shanghai Biennale; the 5th Guangzhou Triennial; MoMA PS1; Centre Pompidou; MACBA; ZKM; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; FKA Witte de With; Times Art Center Berlin; Darat al Funun; MAXXI; Whitechapel Gallery; ICA (London); Beirut Art Center, etc. He is currently Professor at the American University in Cairo. Learn more about the artist.
The National Museum of Broken Treaties
Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne and Arapaho b. 1954 Wichita, Kansas) with a response by Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne & Hodulgee Muscogee b. 1945 Oklahoma)
March - June 2024
Hock E Aye Vi Edgard Heap of Birds’ work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at major institutions such as the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, the Berkely Art Museum, California, the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian, and The Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions at museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, The Peabody Essex Museum, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York; and in international biennials such as SITE Santa Fe, La Biennale di Venezia, and Documenta. He has also created major commissions for the Walker Art Center and Public Art Fund and been the recipient of awards from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and The Rockefeller Foundation, among others. His work confronts histories of settler-imposed violence on Indigenous communities both in the United States and globally. His site-specific public art often draws parallels between these histories and contemporary injustices. Heap of Birds has taught at the University of Oklahoma, Yale University, Rhode Island School of Design, and Michaelis School of Fine Art.
Suzan Shown Harjo is arguably the most consistent and effective advocate for Native American rights over the last five decades. As executive director of the National Congress of American Indians (1980s) and president of The Morning Star Institute (1984-), she has helped develop critical legislation, including the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, the National Museum of the American Indian Act, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. A founding trustee of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, curator, poet, and columnist, Harjo has been at the center of almost every legislative, legal, and cultural issue of import to Native Peoples, including protection of cultural rights and sacred places and the return of over one million acres of Indigenous lands. Recipient of a 2014 Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honor, she is Editor and Guest Curator of the book (2014, Smithsonian Books) and award-winning exhibition (2014-2021, NMAI Museum on the Mall) of the same title, “Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations.”
National Museum of Nostalgia for the Very Moment You Are Living
Pablo Helguera (b. 1971 Mexico City) with a written response by Janera Solomon
September 2023 – February 2024
Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) is a New York based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, socially engaged art and performance. Helguera’s work incorporates pedagogy, sociology and theater and literary strategies. His project, “The School of Panamerican Unrest”, a nomadic think-tank that physically crossed the continent by car from Anchorage, Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, making 40 stops in between and covering almost 20,000 miles, it is considered one of the most extensive public art projects on record as well as a pioneering work of socially engaged art.
Since 1991, Helguera has worked in a variety of contemporary art museums, most recently as head of public programs at the Education department of the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1998-2005). From 2007 until his appointment at the New School, he was the Director of Adult and Academic programs at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He has organized more than 1000 public events in conjunction with nearly 100 exhibitions. In 2010 he was appointed pedagogical curator of the 8th Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil, which took place in September, 2011. Helguera is a Guggenheim Fellow and has received the Creative Capital, Art Matters, Franklin Furnace and Blade of Grass fellowships, as well as the First International Award of Participatory Art from the Region Emilia Romagna (Bologna). He holds a PhD from Kingston University, London, and an honorary PhD from the Kansas Art Institute. Helguera has exhibited and performed individually in many museums and biennials around the world. He is the author of several books including Education for Socially Engaged Art (2011), The Parable Conference (2014) and An Atlas of Commonplaces (2015).
Janera Solomon is a writer, curator, and cultural strategist based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Born in Georgetown, Guyana, she draws inspiration from the music, dance, writing, and art of the African and Caribbean diaspora.
Solomon has been a participant with Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference, the Looking Glass Rock Writers Conference, and a fellow with the Martha’s Vineyard Creative Writing Institute. As a dramaturg, she is currently at work with Burkina Faso/U.S.-based choreographer Olivier Tarpaga on his newest work, scheduled for U.S. premiere in fall 2023. She is completing her debut collection of essays and poems, Here Comes the Sun.Solomon holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Pittsburgh and a Master of Arts in writing (nonfiction) from Johns Hopkins University.
The National Museum is founded and organized by Jon Rubin, an interdisciplinary artist whose public projects create platforms for collaboration, participation, and exchange. He has exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Mercosul Biennial, Brazil; the Shanghai Biennial; the Carnegie International, The Lyon Biennale; the Solomon Guggenheim Museum; as well as in backyards, living rooms, and street corners. Rubin recently collaborated with Iranian-based artist Sohrab Kashani on The Other Apartment, a Creative Capital funded project occurring both in Tehran, Iran and Pittsburgh, PA. He has received awards from the Arts Matters Foundation, the Creative Work Fund, Americans for the Arts, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Conflict Kitchen, Rubin’s collaborative seven-year work with artist Dawn Weleski, was named as one of the 100 Artworks that “Defined the Decade” by Artnet News. His work has been reported on internationally by outlets including ARTnews, The New York Times, The Associated Press, Public Art Review, Art Papers, The Boston Globe, La Repubblica, Al Jazeera, BBC World News, NPR’s All Things Considered, and Colorado Public Radio.
The National Museum is presented by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust in collaboration with Jon Rubin. Special thanks to project advisory board members Anastasia James, Director of Curatorial, Pittsburgh Cultural Trust; Paola Santoscoy, Director of the El Eco Experimental Museum in Mexico City; Joseph del Pesco, International Director of KADIST; and Sean Beauford, Pittsburgh-based curator, educator, and writer. Graphic design by Brett Yasko.
For more information visit national-museum.org.