Adrianne Rubenstein: Fruit Business

Broadway is pleased to present Fruit Business a solo exhibition of new paintings by New York artist Adrianne Rubenstein, on view June 4 - July 17 with an opening reception Thursday, June 4th 6-8PM.

I wanted to capture the mystique of my family’s fruit business, so important all my life as an identifier, the engine for stories, and occasionally the motivation behind some of my paintings. It began some time in the 1930s with a fruit cart, a picture you might see decorating a Lower East Side deli, but in Montreal. My Zaide started working there as a child, grew the business and he and my grandmother traveled the world. As a result, my family began eating avocados earlier than most. Even after he retired and the business was long disestablished, my grandfather would drive around visiting different stores to analyze their produce. When he found something good, he would buy a whole crate, load it into his car and drive around making deliveries to all his friends and relatives. 

During the reign of my parents generation, the business was run by my uncle and for a brief time employed my mother, father, aunt, and everyone else we knew. It was a stressful business with tiny margins, the fruit had to be shipped from all over the world. My uncle compared it to a stock market where the shares are perishable, so the men were awake at all hours, sometimes buying and selling the entire boat just to move its contents. My mom and aunt did things like handing out samples of exotic fruit at the grocery store and other marketing. At one point the trucks with the family logo were all over the city. There was a giant warehouse I would visit and help myself to as many fruit stickers as I could handle.

The idea of selling fruit feels so clean and healthy, a natural delivery system for nutrients, a bag of oranges for a nickel. At the same time, in my mind, it is full of international intrigue and a way of gathering culture from all over the world, distilled into plums that are eaten at a back yard birthday party. Originally, when I started painting broccoli, I was thinking of it as a little model for a tree, something Renaissance painters may have used as a little studio trick to get their branches looking more realistic. The broccoli also had all its arms cut off, to fit in a box, so the shape we know and recognize has been altered for commercial needs. In addition to being a healthy food, and a flowering plant, these aspects together are what made me want to paint broccoli as a symbol. In all my paintings, there is a similar distillation of ideas and formalities.

Another thing I was thinking about is the evolution over time from fruit peddler to MFA. I was reminiscing about how nice it would be to count boxes of grapefruit loaded onto a truck and my aunt said I should be grateful that I never had to work there. She says that grocers were always trying to return rotten fruit they had bought from someone else, that my grandfather worked 14 hour days, 6 days a week. But the fruit itself was so endlessly beautiful, fascinating and delicious. My grandfather was able to be generous with it, and as it changed hands it would always be multiplying in context and meaning.

—Adrianne Rubenstein
May 2026, New York

To request a preview, please email info@broadwaygallery.nyc