Tammie Rubin

“I am at my best when I’m escaping”

March 17 – April 29, 2023

*Blue Headdresses and North Star,* 2023, stoneware, underglaze, house paint

Big Medium proudly presents I am at my best when I’m escaping by Tammie Rubin, our 2022 Tito’s Prize Recipient.

The exhibition, I am at my best when I’m escaping, delves into the artist’s fascination with power objects, coded symbols, migration, rituals, and faith. Rubin employs ceramic conical forms, raised maps, and murals to create spaces of metaphysical, physical, and spiritual escape and relocation. Using imagery and objects of the familiar, she contemplates ideas of authenticity and inherited meanings while inviting new considerations that open dream-like spaces of unexpected associations and dislocations.

Rubin muses Big Medium’s gallery as a portal of escape. Referencing Underground Railroad quilts, she uses the patterns as symbolic anchors of Black American freedoms. Both the individual and collective seizure of physical and mental autonomy. Emanating from painted murals, she creates abstracted topographic “maps,” composed of stake flags, porcelain, wire, foam, wood, bells, fencing, porcelain, and readymades. Rubin intertwines her own American Citizenry by weaving in family narratives and images through Masonite prayer fans and plotted drawings. Conical sculptures dot the space referencing hoods, headdresses, and helmets. Totemic-like, the sculptures manifest power, awe, horror, magical thinking, and spirituality. Intimating West African and Aboriginal headdresses, capirote hats, and cone-wearing figures striving for fraternity, anonymity, and pageantry. The sculpture surfaces are adorned with attachments. Are they treasure or detritus, offerings of thanks, or wards of protection?

”This award is an extraordinary gift of time and exploration. Rubin thanks the Tito’s Handmaid Vodka, Big Medium, the 2022 Curatorial Panel Allison Glenn, writer, and independent curator; Elyse Gonzales, Director of Ruby City Museum in San Antonio; and Coka Treviño, Curator and Director of Programming at Big Medium.”

I am at my best when I’m escaping runs from March 17 through April 29, 2023.

Opening Reception: March 17, 8-10 PM | RSVP here

Members will receive a separate email with an RSVP link
Gallery Hours Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, 12-6 PM

About the artist

Tammie Rubin is an artist whose sculptural practice considers the intrinsic power of objects as signifiers, wishful contraptions, and mythic relics while investigating the tension between the readymade and the handcrafted. Using intricate motifs, Rubin delves into themes involving ritual, domestic and liturgical objects, mapping, migration, magical thinking, longing, and identity. Her installations open up dream-like spaces of unexpected associations and dislocations. Rubin received a BFA in both Ceramics and Art History from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and an MFA in Ceramics at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Rubin has exhibited widely; selections include Project Row Houses, Houston, TX., the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY., George Washington Carver Museum, Austin, TX., Mulvane Art Museum, KS., Indianapolis Art Center, Indianapolis, IN.,

The Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, TX., Women & Their Work Gallery, Austin, TX. She's represented by C24 Gallery, New York, NY., Galleri Urbane, Dallas, TX., & Rivalry Projects, Buffalo, NY.

Rubin’s artwork has received reviews in online and print publications such as Artforum, Art in America, Glasstire, Austin American- Statesman, Austin Chronicle, Sightlines, fields, Conflict of Interest, Arts and Culture Texas, Ceramics: Art & Perception, and Ceramics Monthly. She founded Black Mountain Project along with fellow Austin-based artists Adrian Aguilera and Betelhem Makonnen, and she is a member of ICOSA Collective, a non-profit cooperative gallery. Born and raised in Chicago, Rubin lives in Austin, Texas where she is an Associate Professor of Ceramics & Sculpture at St. Edward’s University.

tammierubin.com