Rachel Epp Buller

As a new member of the local Carriage Factory Art Gallery, I am participating in a members exhibition opening this Thursday, January 26, 5-7pm.

After a week of matting and framing and wrapping, I am ready to deliver the new work for my upcoming show. “Those Were the Days” opens at the Steckline Gallery at Newman University on Friday, January 27. I started this series of monoprints a year ago, after experimenting with some image transfer techniques with the awesome Heinrich Toh. When we returned from Berlin and I returned to the prints, I reworked many of them into mixed media pieces. What began as a private production on family history became a larger meditation on my Mennonite cultural heritage as I fragmented and recontextualized historic photographs, settlement and migration maps, and references to historic language and writing.

Newman folks put together a nice press release about the show here.

After a whirlwind trip back to Berlin last week, I can say with confidence that progress was made, even if there is still a long ways to go. I am working with museum colleagues to stage an exhibition, looking ahead to January 2014. In the meantime, there is much book-writing to be done, grant funding to be located, and all the exhibition details to be put into place. It feels overwhelming, in many respects, but exciting, too. I am thankful for supportive colleagues at the AdK and the Verborgene Museum who believe in this project.

Welcome, 2012!  I spent so much of 2011 in Berlin that I’m very excited to be making a quick trip back next week. Many, many thanks to the generous funding of the Gerda Henkel foundation for making this trip possible. I have a few research details to follow up, some meetings to set up with colleagues, and I think I hear some pastries calling my name, too. Mostly, though, I plan to make it a week of intensive writing and exhibition planning. Time to get this show on the road!

Staying in our old neighborhood - convenient and nostalgic

I’ve participated several times in the annual benefit exhibition put on by Visual AIDS, and this year my drawing students got involved with making art for a good cause, too. Yesterday I packaged up and mailed off our 4×6″ works, where they will be exhibited at Cheim and Read in New York, January 6-8, 2012. Each work is sold for $85 and each is exhibited anonymously – meaning that buyers may come away with work by a well-known artist, an emerging artist, or even a student artist.

What a lovely surprise to have the print-quilts profiled in Kate Hansen’s Sunday feature. It’s always gratifying when one’s work resonates with someone else, and she wrote beautifully about the series. Extending the concept from fingerprints to imprinting was a particularly nice touch. If only I didn’t have so many other ideas swirling in my head right now, I would surely return to this series.

I’m in the process of re-purposing some historical photographs that a colleague recently passed on to me. Combined with tea-soaked historical map imagery as well as a foray into the tradition of Scherenschnitte, here is an early attempt.

The arts are alive! I was privileged last night to be part of a brainstorming discussion for the concrete beginnings of a community art center here in Newton. This is something I dreamed of years ago for Newton, even when I wasn’t living here, and now it looks like it’s finally going to happen. The awesome Micala G-G is heading up a campaign to transform the Expressive Art Center (formerly of Youthville) into a center that will serve as the hub for arts education and expression for kids and adults throughout our community. I’m so excited about the possibilities for this space–classes to be taught, artistic visions to be nurtured, arts partnerships to be established. And all of this in spite of the dire funding situation for the arts in Kansas!

This is the very beginning stages of a collaboration for the “Art Lives!” exhibition next spring, in which pairs of artists around the state respond to the Kansas governor’s elimination of any public funding for the arts. Through my reworking of a “Great Book” – a single volume that includes both Machiavelli’s The Prince and Hobbes’ Leviathan - I make general references to art and the economy and to the transformational capabilities of art, as well as some specific references to the roles of Kansas Mennonites in art and culture. This is very much  a work in progress and I post a few photos here mainly for my collaborator’s benefit.

I sometimes think that, if money were no object, a scholar could spend her entire career traveling from conference to conference. There are just so many opportunities for hearing and presenting work. I try to be selective, and sometimes when it comes down to it, I don’t really feel like going, but once I get there, I’m always glad that I did. The energy I gain from hearing smart, well-presented ideas and stimulating follow-up discussion is like nothing else. And, it often feels like a working vacation, with the opportunity to hole up in a nice hotel room and get some thinking and writing done, early in the morning or late in the evening. Being in Toronto this weekend for a conference on Mothering, Education, and Maternal Pedagogies gave me a chance to present some new work, renew and establish connections, and coalesce my thoughts about some upcoming writing projects. It feels great to be returning home with such renewed energy. Many thanks to Andrea O’Reilly and the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement.

And, with trams AND a television tower, Toronto felt almost like Berlin.