Rebecca Keller

Professor, Adjunct, Art Education

rebeccakeller.net/home.html

Rebecca Keller has been teaching at SAIC since 1996. She took her sabbatical during the Fall 2022.

Rebecca Keller is an artist and writer, recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, two Fulbright awards, the Illinois Arts Council and a TED talk. Her interest in language and history skirts disciplinary boundaries.

Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Hyde Park Art Center; the 4^th International Waldkunst Bienniel, the Tartu (Estonia) Art Museum; Chesterwood Museum, the Tides Institute, the Elmhurst Art Museum and the City of Chicago as well as exhibitions and projects in the U.S., Europe and Brazil. She has been invited to intervene in online archives by the Portland Art Museum, to write an essay imagining a future for museum collections by “The Public Historian”; and contributed to the textbook Art and Public History (Rowman/Littlefield). She is also the author of Excavating History; When Artists Take on Historic Sites, (Stepsister) a book about her projects using historic research as an engine for art-making. Her essay “Mazes and Mirrors; Reflections and Play” is published by the Frans Hals museum.

Keller also writes fiction. Two of her short stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut novel You Should Have Known was released in 2023 by Crooked Lane/Penguin Random House.

Education

MFA Northern Illinois University
MA Northern Illinois University
BFA Minneapolis College of Art and Design

Notable Classes Taught:

Naming Nature (Sculpture)
Excavating History (Sculpture)
Art Activism and Response (Art History)
History of Public Space (Art History)
Teaching Art at the College Level (Art Ed)
Museums: History, Theory and Practice (Art Ed)

Sabbatical Reflection

The work of teaching is simultaneously intellectual, creative, emotional and relational. At a place like SAIC, which offers students individualized attention, specific, often specialized content and approaches one wouldn’t find elsewhere, the work of teaching is deeply meaningful and intense. Coupled with expectations of a high level of creative and professional accomplishment in one’s personal practice, as well as linkages between one’s creative and pedagogical work, teaching here is both enormously rewarding and personally and creatively draining.

Thinking about my classes and my students tends to flow into all my available mental and emotional space, making carving out time/capacity to develop new directions or reimagine my current practice difficult. My sabbatical enabled me to explore new possibilities and build new creative muscles. It was a critical, much needed time of reflection, exploration and freedom.