Joseph del Pesco + Jon Rubin
Site: 2712 Cherokee Street
Joseph del Pesco + Jon Rubin unveil a new commission, Monuments, Ruins and Forgetting at the previously vacant storefront of 2712 Cherokee Street. A three-part installation consisting of storefront signage, street posters, and musical performances, Monuments, Ruins and Forgetting inaugurates a prospective National Museum that—over the course of three months—presents a micro-narrative about historical progression.
Del Pesco and Rubin consider, how does a nation or city or neighborhood decide what to collectively remember? Which histories are deemed worth saving and which are ignored, denied or forgotten? How long does it take for monuments to become ruins, or for once widely known stories to be forgotten?
In the United States, there are now more museums than Starbucks and McDonalds combined, and each museum collects and narrates history. Many American cities, including St. Louis, have opened self-styled national museums, attempting to connect national narratives of exceptionalism to local identities. What does this proliferation of museum-making tell us about where we are in the arc of American culture and empire? Should we be imagining more museums?
Monuments, Ruins and Forgetting, speaks to a cyclical process of change—the appearance of new directions and potential futures alongside remnants of the past, soon faded from memory.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Joseph del Pesco is a curator, writer and publisher. Since 2009 he’s been Director, and in 2016 became International Director of KADIST (Paris & San Francisco). At KADIST in San Francisco del Pesco established a fast-paced program that positioned art as a vehicle for discussion about global social and political issues, and started the first residency for international art magazines. Previously he was adjunct curator at Artists Space (NYC), a fellow at the Banff Centre and assistant curator at the UC Davis Museum. He’s organized exhibitions, projects and publications at The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Temple Contemporary, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, among others. He’s been in residence on Fogo Island, SOMA in Mexico City, Beta-Local in Puerto Rico, The Luminary in St. Louis and ArtPort in Tel Aviv. His recent collection of short stories, The Museum Took a Few Minutes To Collect Itself, was published by Art Metropole, Toronto in October of 2017.
Jon Rubin is an interdisciplinary artist who creates interventions into public life that re-imagine individual, group, and institutional behavior. Projects include Conflict Kitchen, The Last Billboard, The Royal Danish Protesters, and The Independent School of Art. He has exhibited at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Guggenheim Museum; The Mercosul Biennial, Brazil; The Shanghai Biennial; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; The Carnegie International; as well as in backyards, living rooms, and street corners. Rubin was a finalist for the International Award for Participatory Art and a recipient of the Creative Capital Award. Rubin is Director of the Graduate Program in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.
