About

The thrill of being anywhere without a purpose is to be headlong within a tidal wave of intersections and intertwined sensations. The “artifacts” I create are driven, variably, by research into the past, visions of strange futures, conversations with people who care about their place, or maps of movements or histories investigating the real, the historic, and the imagined--meeting people, creatively interacting, finding clandestine knowledge that has been ignored, repressed, or is yet unknown, documenting in some ways my own dislocation. It is a sort of cut-and-paste process that samples place and politics, where my identity as American tourist/American citizen becomes an interrogation of power, privilege, and American-ness through negation and/or return of the gaze.
 
Patterns in the transitions and movements of people, places, and spaces –and their resistance to authority— creates dissonance within the urban fabric. As of the 2020-22 pandemic, I'm thinking more about the contrast between my Midwestern suburban-ness, the struggles of international and domestic peoples who take to and use the streets for survival, and the implications of witnessing political upheaval from a social media-inflected distance; the simultaneous desire for comfort and disruption.

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Robert Bubp is an interdisciplinary artist using in situ, performative research to search for and document experiences and situations via direct recording, collected ephemera, and mapping specific presences and movements. His work incorporates painting, drawing, video, installation, and on occasion crosses into social practice.

Bubp's work has been shown in over 60 exhibitions, including Harvester Arts in Wichita, Ks., the Salina Art Center in Salina, Ks., the Kouvola Art Museum in Kouvola, Finland, the Indianapolis Art Center, the CICA Museum in Gimpo-si, South Korea, the Spartanburg Art Museum in Spartanburg, S.C., and a permanent exhibition at the University of Kansas-Edwards Campus in Overland Park, Ks. Bubp’s work has appeared in local and national publications including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, ArtPapers, and Art in America. He has participated in several artists’ residencies, including Arquetopia in Puebla, Mexico in 2015, at Wayfarers Studios in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 2018, and was a visiting artist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2016 and at Massey University in Wellington, New Zealand in 2019.

He has won numerous grants and university awards, including a Master Artist Fellowship from the Kansas Arts Commission in 2005, the WSU College of Fine Arts Excellence in Teaching Award in 2005 and again in 2015, the WSU College of Fine Arts Award for Fine Arts Special Endeavor for initiation and development of the downtown student gallery, WSU Shift Space, in 2006. In 2010, Bubp was honored with the university-wide Award for Creative Activity for recognition of an ambitious creative agenda including creative projects on campus and in the regional community. He completed an MFA in Drawing, Painting, & Printmaking at Georgia State University in 2002, and a BFA at the University of Georgia in 1993. He is currently Professor of Art at Wichita State University, in Wichita, Ks.