A painter, illustrator, educator, lecturer, curator and native New Yorker with a 40 year career with over 60 solo and group exhibitions, Cornel Rubino relocated to Baltimore, Maryland, and is currently teaching painting, drawing, sculptural forms and visual thinking at the Maryland Institute College of Art. He is currently working on new paintings and drawings exploring narcolepsy and somnambulism for publication by Galerie Vevais, Berlin, Germany in 2023.
He is the recipient of the Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Sculpture/Installation and has been profiled since being in Maryland on both National Public Radio’s “Inside the Arts” and Maryland Public Television “Artworks This Week”. His works are in the collections of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Museum of Contemporary Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Museum of American Illustration, New York; Museo del Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy and in numerous international corporate and private collections.
Many of the monumental drawing installations Rubino created include, “Cerca Trova”, exploring the fine line between victims and those who prey on them at Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan; “Mondo Botanico”, commemorating life and death in the Richman Gallery at the Park School in Baltimore; “Out of Place” exploring how the able-bodied maneuver through the world of the disabled at the University of Maryland, College Park; “Stray Dogs”, a commentary on the homeless dilemma for the spare room space in Baltimore; “MOBTOWN”, spanning 2000 sq. ft. at the Creative Alliance Patterson Arts Center in Baltimore; “Obsession, Addiction, Passion”, American Visionary Arts Museum in Baltimore and “Cockfight, A Treatise on the Cruelty of the Petit Bourgeoisie” on the walls of the round gallery at the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center.
A winner of various awards including the Society of Publication Designers and Communication Arts Award and the Abby Award for Atlanta Artist of the Year, Rubino’s editorial clients include The New Yorker, where he is under contract as a regular contributor, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, Penthouse, Gourmet and other national magazines. Rubino has created numerous posters for various clients such as the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, International Habitat for Humanity, the Lincoln Center season of New York’s EOS Orchestra, the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, the American Institute of Graphic Artists, the High Museum of Art and the Atlanta Symphony among others.
Lectures include Picasso at the High Museum of Art; 20th Century Art at the Nexus Contemporary Arts Center; Master Drawings from the Worcester Art Museum at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University and on his own work at Johns Hopkins University. Rubino also moderates the Annual Critic’s Residency Public Forum at Maryland Art Place in Baltimore. He lectured on the exhibit “Beauty and the Brain, A Neural Approach to Aesthetics” at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. He began his undergraduate work in graphic design at Parsons School of Design in New York and continued his undergraduate and graduate studies in painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, Italy, where he lived and kept his studio for 12 years.