May 31 - August 8, 2026
Throughout summer 2026, the National Museum of the Aftermath is operating within OXY ARTS. This speculative museum, conceived and titled by Cauleen Smith and curated by Jon Rubin and Harrison Kinnane Smith, is the most recent iteration of Rubin's National Museum. The ongoing project moves between cities, changing its name and form with each iteration, critically asking which histories and futures are deemed worth telling and which are ignored or forgotten.
The National Museum of the Aftermath positions the present as post-historical, asking: "What strategies of survival can we develop in the wake of the uncountable endings our history contains?"
This summer, the Museum will periodically operate as a sound stage for the artist Cauleen Smith, who will film three scenes hovering between the real and speculative. Each stages the internal negotiations of collective struggle — the gatherings, disagreements, and nuances of people trying to build something together within and alongside what remains. The material traces and video documentation of these private performances will be on view for the public during the gallery's regular open hours and provide the context for a series of public gatherings. These will include a film series, reading group, and an open call to individuals and organizations motivated to confront the proposition that we are already living in an aftermath.
By opening the gallery to a multiplicity of uses, the Museum seeks to challenge the conventions of its form — rather than a space to be filled with artifacts and objects, it has become a place for research, performance, and shared thought. This is also an act of para-institutional nesting: OXY ARTS operating semi-independently within Occidental College; The National Museum hovering between speculative institution and artist project; and inside all of that, Cauleen Smith's National Museum of the Aftermath — an artist project within a fictional museum within an arts space within a college.
The open call for proposals, and schedule for the film screenings and reading group will be announced soon. Join the National Museum of the Aftermath
Writer: Regina Freer
Curators: Harrison Kinnane Smith and Jon Rubin
National Museum Founder and Organizer: Jon Rubin
Designer and Sign Painter: Nick Caruso
About National Museum
The National Museum is an ongoing project founded and organized by Jon Rubin that critically asks which histories and futures are deemed worth saving and which are ignored or forgotten. Changing its name as it moves to new cities, every version is developed in collaboration with artists and host institutions who are invited to wrestle with the problematics of the national, reinvent the terms of the museum and propose what else culture might hold in common. Beginning in Pittsburgh, where it ran from 2023–25, the project has expanded to current iterations at Beta Local in San Juan, Puerto Rico and OXY ARTS in Los Angeles. Past National Museum artists and writers include Pablo Helguera, Walid Raad, Jalal Toufic, Edgar Heap of Birds, Suzan Shown Harjo, Dread Scott, and Saul Williams.