Rachel Epp Buller

And, the other new thing to read is the new issue of Woman’s Art Journal that arrived in the mail today.

(this isn’t the current issue, which must be so new that there aren’t yet images up)

I write occasional book reviews for WAJ, and this issue includes my review of the Eva Besnyoe catalog that was published last year by the Verborgene Museum in Berlin. Seeing it in print and knowing of their great work makes me very excited to return to Berlin this summer and continue on with plans for our eventual collaboration. 

Just got the announcement today that Mothering and Literacies has been published, showcasing my artwork on the cover and an essay of mine on “Visual Literacies of Mothering.” Hooray! It’s been awhile in process, so great to see this project come to fruition.

Click here to see the Table of Contents, as well as ordering information. All titles are 40% off until June 1!

Thanks to the F5 art magazine for publishing a good review (print and online) of the “Postpartum” exhibition. Click here to read the review. The exhibition was well-attended both at the closing reception and throughout its duration.

What a pleasure to be able to mount this exhibition of diverse work, to expand the idea of postpartum for my students and for the wider community. Thanks to all of the artists who participated!

A few more installation photographs from “Postpartum” at Erman B. White Gallery, El Dorado. March 1 – April 5, 2013.

Last week I had the privilege of chairing a panel at PRINT: MKE, this year’s gathering of the  Southern Graphic Council International, in Milwaukee, WI. We convened an all-Kansas panel on the theme of “Occupy Art,” designed to bring attention to what’s happening in our state under the current administration. Stephen Goddard, Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, provided background on “Printmakers, Free Thinkers, and Other Radicals in Kansas.” Dave Loewenstein spoke on his involvement with the nation-wide Occupy and Occuprint movements, as well as on his agitational protest work about arts funding in Kansas. Ashley Laird shared her recent series of drawings on issues of reproductive rights, as seen in last year’s “Turning Back the C(l)ock” exhibition, and I finished with some brief discussion of the “Art Lives!” exhibition, before we were able to open it up for discussion among audience members, who shared about Occupy work happening in their own states and offered ideas for next steps. In many ways, Wisconsin is in a similar boat as Kansas, and I was excited to learn about on-going creative political collaborations such as the Overpass Light Brigade.

from left, Ashley Laird, Dave Loewenstein, Stephen Goddard, and Rachel Epp Buller

The Postpartum exhibition has opened! This, too, will be a resource for my Women and Gender in Art History seminar, and participating artist Mariangeles Soto-Diaz will be a visiting artist on campus next month. Exciting times ahead!

Postpartum runs March 1 – April 5, 2013 at the E.B. White Gallery, Butler Community College, El Dorado, KS. Public reception: Friday, April 5, 6-8pm.

Curator’s Statement:

In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke penned this passage a century ago:

You must give birth to your images
They are the future waiting to be born
Fear not the strangeness you feel
The future must enter you
Long before it happens
Just wait for the birth,
For the hour of the new clarity.

For the artists showcased in this Postpartum exhibition, the journey toward and through parenthood has included strangeness, waiting, and the birthing of new images, if not always clarity. While we think of the postpartum period as a short one, perhaps only a few weeks long, its definition as the time “following childbirth” can extend into months or even years. Certainly, the physical and emotional changes brought on by parenthood do not end after a short time; some cause shifts in identity that last a lifetime.

Postpartum is more than a response to childbirth, but covers a wide range of issues encountered in the extended postpartum period. The artists included here address the postpartum body and mind, broadly understood. We see work that charts milestones and memorializes the mementos of childhood. We see work created from places of pain and isolation, whether from struggles with postpartum depression or from overwhelming loss and grief. We see transformations of identity as artists seek to reevaluate their work-life balances. And we see artists for whom parenting becomes a catalyst, an inspiration to social activism.

Postpartum is guest curated by Rachel Epp Buller, Assistant Professor of Art at Bethel College and regional coordinator of The Feminist Art Project. Through this and other curatorial endeavors, she aims to give broader exposure to the rich art produced in Kansas and beyond. The artists invited to participate in Postpartum hail not only from Kansas but also from Indiana, California, Washington DC, Connecticut, and Toronto.

   More photos to come

There’s a new art show in town! Or, in the next town over. Partly in conjunction with my Women and Gender in Art History class and partly in collaboration with the Salina Art Center, the Kansas chapter of The Feminist Art Project is sponsoring an exhibition entitled “Working on the Bias.” The exhibition explores themes of gender and identity through work that physically or conceptually incorporates stitched, woven, or embroidered elements. Artist and Watson Gallery director Carolyn Wedel and I curated this showing of work by regional artists as a pendant to a national touring exhibition, “A Complex Weave: Gender and Identity in Contemporary Art,” currently on display at the Salina Art Center.

Details:

Exhibition runs February 22-April 21, 2013
Watson Gallery, Stiefel Theatre
Salina, Kansas

Brown bag lunch with artists: Monday, March 18, noon

Photos of the exhibition here.

I’m so excited to be teaching an undergraduate seminar this spring on Women and Gender in Art History. I’ve taught it before but am using new books, so in many ways it’s a new course. The students are engaged (most of the time) and many of them have been interested in issues of gender and representation in other arenas, so it’s very rewarding to see them making the visual connective leap to these issues in art history as well. I wrote a blog post about it this week for Nursing Clio, so I’ll link to that instead of recapping the whole thing here. The American Historical Association linked to it as well, so clearly I’m not the only one thinking and teaching across the visual art and culture divide. One of my students asked today, “How can we even enjoy art anymore, after learning all of this?” Ah, ignorance is bliss.