It feels long ago that my Winter Walking images from Invitations to Listen echoed the snowy ground in Kansas. By the time the exhibition closed in early June, the campus had turned green and cold days had given way to hot.

We got some good press over the exhibition’s run. The student newspaper, The Washburn Review, was the first to run a story about the show, especially bringing student attention to the participatory walking piece located around campus.

Rafael Garcia of the Topeka Capital-Journal asked thoughtful questions and gave a great writeup, which I only found out after he mailed the hard copies to me that it was front page news!

And shortly before the exhibition closed, Barbara Waterman-Peters wrote such a beautiful, incisive review that she published in The Kansas Reflector. One of my favorite passages from her review is this one: “The subtle method of sharing her own experience renders Buller’s work timeless and therefore powerful. Wanting to be heard, she whispered.” It’s so meaningful when people see the work and really “get it.”

Throughout the exhibition, I had opportunities to work with Washburn students and faculty across disciplines. A class of Contemporary Art Practices students gamely experimented with walking as a form of listening, building on recent work they’d been doing with mapping. I worked with a group of history students on a semester-long project about “listening with objects,” drawing in part on Sherryl Turkle’s book Evocative Objects. And with students in a behavioral ecology class, we discussed links between listening in artistic practices and their work in animal cognition studies. They were so excited to tell me about the different ways they listen to, and with, their animal subjects.

Now that the exhibition has wrapped up, I’m thrilled that my letterpress portfolio, Ten Letters: Listening Toward Our Futures, has been purchased by the Mulvane Art Museum and will enter their permanent collection. I don’t know what will come next for these listening-based artistic inquiries but I am so grateful to the Mulvane staff, particularly director Connie Gibbons and curator Sara Stepp, for their continued support for, and excitement about, my work.