Rachel Epp Buller is a visual and sound artist, feminist art historian, professor, and mother of three. Her artistic, scholarly, and curatorial projects often address these intersections, focusing on the maternal body and feminist care in contemporary art contexts. Her books include Reconciling Art and Mothering (2012); Mothering Mennonite (2013), co-edited with Kerry Fast; and Inappropriate Bodies: Art, Design, and Maternity (2019), co-edited with Charles Reeve. Her current research-creation project is on listening as artistic method in contemporary art. She is a two-time Fulbright Scholar, first as a researcher at the Archiv der Akademie der Künste, Berlin, in 2011, and then as a Canada Research Chair in Arts and Humanities at the University of Alberta in 2022. She has exhibited her artwork in solo and group exhibitions in the US, UK, Netherlands, Germany, and Italy, and in 2016 she curated and wrote the exhibition catalogue for the first-ever retrospective of German artist Alice Lex-Nerlinger, hosted by Das Verborgene Museum in Berlin. She is a board member of the National Women’s Caucus for Art (US), a regional coordinator of The Feminist Art Project (international), and a certified practitioner in Deep Listening. She is Professor of Visual Arts and Design at Bethel College (KS/US) and external affiliated faculty at the Sound Studies Institute, University of Alberta.
Attend Rachel’s keynote address “Walking for Climate Change” on October 16, 11.30 am – 12.30 pm at City Hall (Heritage Room)
We walk for exercise. We walk for transportation. How can we also walk as a climate action? In partnership with the City of Edmonton, Dr. Rachel Epp Buller has been working with student and community groups, bringing them together around embodied practices of walking and Deep Listening. In this presentation, she shares how she turns to walking as an artistic method for attuning to people and place and how her communities have used walking as a mode of listening, to connect with one another, learn from one another, and witness in care-filled ways the impacts of a changing climate on local ecologies. She’ll also hypothesize how walking as a first climate action can support the City of Edmonton’s self-declared mandate to shift organizational culture and decision-making to ensure that “every decision is a climate decision.”
“Winter Walking” is on display at the Edmonton Tower, room 03-365 from October 15 till 25, 2024.