The National Museum
Events
Poetry Reading | Saturday June 1 & Saturday June 8 | 1-3 pm
Please join us for a poetry reading by high school students from City Charter of Suzan Shown Harjo’s poem “Broken Treaties” written in response to Edgar Heap of Birds iteration of the National Museum, a public art project by Jon Rubin. Complimentary copies of the broadside published in conjunction with the project will be available for visitors.
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 each month 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.
March-June 2024
The National Museum of Broken Treaties
Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne and Arapaho, b. 1954 Wichita, Kansas)
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.
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.