Jennifer Rubell (b. 1970) is an American conceptual artist who works in a wide variety of participatory mediums ranging from interactive sculpture, painting, installation and video to food performance. Her pieces often prompt viewers to violate the boundaries associated with art-viewing by touching, inhabiting, consuming or destroying the object. This exploding of the traditional viewer-artwork relationship simultaneously scrambles all kinds of seemingly fixed dualities: passivity-control; creation-consumption; permanence-ephemerality; participation-observation; safety-danger; exposure-privacy; feminism-femininity. Thousands of participants have experienced her performances and work in museums, galleries and public spaces around the world, and she continues to create new site-specific participatory work on a regular basis, inspired by everything from Ivanka Trump to the Utrecht Soccer Club.
Select performances and exhibitions include: Landscapes at Fondation Beyeler in Riehen, Switzerland; Old-Fashioned, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Creation, for Performa, the New York performance-art festival; Made in Texas and Nutcrackers, at the Dallas Contemporary; So Sorry, at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto; The de Pury Diptych at the Saatchi Gallery, London; Icons, at the Brooklyn Museum.
Rubell received a B.A. from Harvard University in Fine Arts.
She lives and works in New York City.