Jennifer Rubell - Two Legacies, Now Home to Roost - NYTimes.com The first time Jennifer Rubell gave a dinner party, at age 9, a guest (a friend of her parents who was a diamond dealer) followed up the next morning with a thank-you gift: a heart-shaped diamond ring. Since then, Ms. Rubell, now 43, has worked as a hotelier, a food writer and an artist, but at heart she has remained a hostess. "When I was a kid, I always thought that the things I was interested in were ideally suited to being a housewife, except there was no way in hell I had any interest in being a housewife," said Ms. Rubell, who is the daughter of Don and Mera Rubell, contemporary-art collectors, and the niece of Steve Rubell, a founder of Studio 54. As an adult, she has tried to bring some of the feminine traits of homemakers and hostesses (feeding people, making them feel comfortable) into the often stuffy realm of museums and galleries. Yet this domestic goddess goes big when she goes home. On a rainy Tuesday in August, in a body shop in Holbrook, N.Y., Ms. Rubell stood beside one of her works: a studio-apartment-size fiberglass sculpture of herself reclining, nude and eight months pregnant (with her son, Max, now a toddler) but with the womb hollowed out, an invitation for guests to climb in. This gesture of extreme hosting is called "Portrait of the Artist." "I want it to totally dominate the space in a way that's demanding," she said, her loosely fitting all-black uniform heightening the contrast with the white maxi-me version of herself beside her. "Yes, it's a very intensely feminine sculpture, both in what is depicted and in what it offers - shelter, love, nurture - but its monumental scale asks a lot of the institution that shows it," in this case the Stephen Friedman Gallery in London, for the Frieze Art Fair Oct. 17 to 20. Ms. Rubell's hostess habit is so deeply ingrained that outside the body shop, as she was about to pop a striped peppermint candy into her mouth, she seemed to remember her manners and offered half of the grape-size mint to a reporter. Hospitality runs in the Rubell family. Beginning in the late "70s, her parents opened their Upper East Side town house to the contemporary-art world for first-night Whitney Biennial parties. Now that they live in Miami, they receive multitudes at their 5,000-work Rubell Family Collection. Steve Rubell was the social director of the disco era, allowing only the chosen few to pass the velvet rope and enter Studio 54. Later he helped conceive the boutique hotel. Ms. Rubell adored her uncle, who died in 1989 at age 45 (she named her daughter, Stevie, after him). She told Harvard Magazine earlier this year, "The biggest thing I got from him is that you can create a powerful, ephemeral moment that means something forever." After attending Public School 6, the Horace Mann School and Harvard, Ms. Rubell moved to Miami to help start and run her family's boutique hotels. She would greet guests in the lobby with freshly baked cakes and pitchers of mojitos. "Someone would ask me if I could get something for them, and I'd say yes and then figure it out," she said. And I never couldn't do it. Never, never, not one time. I would take somebody's underwear home and wash it myself or whatever. As an artist, when she isn't inviting people into her womb, Ms. Rubell has often bridged the distance between artist and viewer with food. "She's really interested in how a space with people and food is curated," said Rashid Johnson, an artist and close friend. In June 2010, for the 600-guest wedding party of another friend, the auctioneer and art dealer Simon de Pury, at the Saatchi Gallery in London, Ms. Rubell divided one floor into two sections: the bride's section, with a display of oysters and Champagne, and the groom's, with hanging sausages, pickles and beer on tap. "One by one," an attendee wrote later, "it dawned on guests that we could participate, eat and drink the display, become part of the artwork." For dinner, guests figured out that their place cards led them not to a table but to one of 69 beds. "To get the food that you wanted," Mr. de Pury said, "you needed to hop from bed to bed." One evening more than 30 years ago, someone buzzed the Rubells" intercom. Mera Rubell asked who was there. Jeff Koons. Who? The young artist said he was there for the Biennial party, and, Ms. Rubell recalled, her mother "told him he was one day late, but he could join the family for dinner." Soon after, the Rubells were among the earliest collectors of his work. "Sometimes I feel like I became an artist because that's who I've seen my parents fall in love with a billion times," Ms. Rubell said. But when you grow up breaking bread with Jeff Koons, and later working in his studio as an intern, it takes courage to aspire to be him. "For a long time," Ms. Rubell said, "I had a psychological resistance to admitting it."