Friday, January 13 & Saturday, January 14, 2023; 10am–5pm
Outlook Gallery
Watch Dr. Rachel Epp Buller embroider “stories of care” in real time! Buller will take up residence in the street-facing Outlook Gallery during the opening and closing weekends of her exhibition, In/Visible Care. She will be embroidering stories submitted by the public onto tea towels that will then be incorporated into her fabric installation. These words—your words—will serve as “evidence of caring gestures, care-fully remembered.”
Please consider sharing a story for this project, either physically or digitally. Responses to the following prompt can be delivered in person at The Shop at MCBA, submitted via this Google Form, or mailed to:
Rachel Epp Buller c/o Minnesota Center for Book Arts / Outlook Gallery
1011 Washington Avenue S., Suite 100
Minneapolis MN 55415
Dear friend,
This is an invitation to participate in a project of listening. My exhibition, In/Visible Care, highlights how we receive and remember acts of care, large and small. Can you remember a time when you felt genuinely cared for by another person? I invite you to write me a letter, recounting how you experienced this gesture of care. I will embroider your words as part of my listening, selecting particular phrases that evoke the giving and receiving of care, for this public installation. I feel it important to make these words visible in a concrete way—for we all know how often such caring labors remain unseen and undervalued.
As I receive your stories of care from the past, I will also offer you, in exchange, some words of care for the future (so please include your mailing address if you wish to receive these by post).
Thank you for your time in listening to me and caring for my words. I hope to reciprocate the labors.
Take care,
Rachel
Dr. Rachel Epp Buller is a visual 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 current research-creation project concerns listening as artistic method in contemporary art. Her project of taking care and listening through words and embroidery launched in 2018 in Berlin and has since been exhibited in London, Rotterdam, and at Mass MoCA. 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 is a board member of the National Women’s Caucus for Art (US), a regional coordinator of The Feminist Art Project (international), Professor of Visual Arts and Design at Bethel College (KS/US), and a certified practitioner in Deep Listening.