Nancy Rubins

Her sculptural works are primarily composed of blooming arrangements of large rigid objects such as televisions, small appliances, camping and construction trailers, hot water heaters, mattresses, airplane parts, rowboats, kayaks, canoes, surfboards, and other objects.

In college, Rubins worked primarily with clay, creating igloo-like sculptures out of mud, concrete, and straw.

[5] After college, Rubins taught night classes at City College of San Francisco and scavenged the local Goodwill and Salvation Army stores in San Francisco, where she was living at the time, collecting nearly 300 television sets for 25 to 50 cents apiece.

Constructed of various discarded appliances, the installation towered forty-three feet high outside of the Cermak Plaza shopping center in Berwyn, Illinois.

In 1982, the Washington Project for the Arts funded Rubins's Worlds Apart,[4] a forty-five foot tall temporary installation composed of abandoned appliances, concrete and steel rebar.

[3] While in Washington Rubins was contacted by artist Charles Ray to teach at UCLA where she met Chris Burden.

[3] Rubins is perhaps best known for building sculptures out of salvaged airplane parts, such as an installation in 1995 for the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the piece weighed nearly 10,000 pounds.

[8] Rubins collaborated with husband Chris Burden on a number of projects, including an installation called A Monument to Megalopolises Past and Future at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) in 1987.

In the late 1980s Rubins started working with discarded mattresses which were inspired by pastries she saw in Vienna – both relate to dreams in her mind.