About

Robert Bubp is an interdisciplinary artist who uses site-based, performative research to search for and document experiences and situations through recording, ephemera, and mapping specific presences and movements. He is a professor of Painting and Drawing and coordinator of the MFA at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas, USA.

Robert Bubp has been included in over 70 exhibitions. He has participated in several artist 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, at Massey University in Wellington, New Zealand in 2019, and at the Universidad Nacional de Ingenería in Lima, Peru in 2024.

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The thrill of being anywhere without a purpose is to be headlong within a tidal wave of intersections and intertwined sensations. In my work I make these intersections visual by investigating the real, the historic, and sometimes the imagined in places and communities by meeting people, creatively interacting, finding clandestine knowledge that has been ignored, repressed, or is yet unknown through drawings, videos, paintings, and community projects. Mapping processes and found and unusual materials are often featured to push the work from strict representation into objects, which I think of as “artifacts" from these intersections and situations.

The things I make and do are usually documentary but also poetic. They can be fragmentarily connected to conversations with people who care about their place, or maps of movements or stories that obliquely refer to the real, the historical, and/or the imagined. Often my identity as an American tourist/American citizen becomes an interrogation of privilege and Americanness through the denial and/or return of the tourist gaze. The work seeks to uncover patterns in the transitions and movements of people, places, and spaces – and their resistance to authority – that can show dissonance within the urban fabric.

Beginning with the 2020-22 pandemic and especially into the 2025 presidency, I'm thinking more about the the anxieties of remain-in-place, my existence as a citizen of the USA, the struggles of people taking to and using the streets to survive, and the ironies and implications of witnessing personal and political horror from the comfort of home via social media.