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 and at Massey University in Wellington, New Zealand in 2019.

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I consider myself a person who creates “artifacts,” variably driven by investigations into the past, visions of strange futures, conversations with people who care about their place, or maps of movements or stories that investigate the real, the historical, and the imagined: meeting people, interacting creatively, finding clandestine knowledge that has been ignored, repressed or still unknown, somehow documenting my own dislocation. It's a kind of cut and paste process that shows the place and the politics, where. My identity as an American tourist/American citizen becomes an interrogation of power, privilege, and Americanness through the denial and/or return of the tourist gaze. Mapping processes reveal stories, patterns, and systems that need constant visibility or monitoring.

Patterns in the transitions and movements of people, places and spaces – and their resistance to authority – create dissonance within the urban fabric. Beginning with the 2020-22 pandemic, I am thinking more about the contrast between my existence as a citizen of the USA, the struggles of national and international people taking to and using the streets to survive, and the implications of witnessing political upheaval via social media.