Meridel Rubenstein

Monks in a Canoe by Meridel Rubenstein, 2000-2001, Honolulu Museum of Art

Meridel Rubenstein (born 1948) is an American photographer and installation artist.

She was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1948. In 1970, Rubenstein earned a bachelor's degree in social science, with a film-making emphasis from Sarah Lawrence College. She received an M.A. from the University of New Mexico in 1974 and an M.F.A. from the same institution in 1977, studying with Beaumont Newhall and Franck Van Deren Coke.^[1] She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1983.^[2] She lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Rubenstein is best known for her large-format photographs incorporating sculptures and unusual media, such as Monks in a Canoe from 2000-2001 in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art. This work consists of a dye transfer on glass and a found wooden dug-out canoe. The Honolulu Museum of Art, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (Hamburg, Germany), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC) are among the public collections holding work by Meridel Rubenstein.^[3]

References

Davis, Tim, "Beyond the Sacred and the Profane: Cultural Landscape Photography in

America, 1930-1990", in Mapping American Culture, ed. Wayne Franklin and Michael Steiner, Univ. of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 1992, pp. 191–230.

Garner, Gretchen, Reclaiming Paradise: American Women Photograph the Land, Tweed Museum of Art, University of Minnesota, Duluth, 1987, pp. 38–39.
Green, Jonathan, American Photography -A Critical History, Harry Abrams, 1984,

pp. 149,154, 211.

Jussim, Estelle, Landscape as Photograph, Yale University Press, 1985, pp. 17, 18, 128-30.
Rubenstein, Meridel, “Georgia O’Keefe as a Role Model”, in From the Faraway Nearby: Georgia O’Keeffe as Icon, ed. Christopher Merrill and Ellen Bradbury, Addison-Wesley, 1992, pp. 187–92.
Rubenstein, Meridel, La Gente De La Luz, New MMexico Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, 1977.
Rubenstein, Meridel and Ellen Zweig, Critical Mass, New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, 1993.
Smith, Joshua P. and Merry A. Foresta, The Photography of Invention – American Pictures of the 1980s, National Museum of American Art, MIT Press, pp. 166–67.
Yates, Steve, The Essential Landscape, Univ of New Mexico Press,1985,pp. 23,132-5.