R. Stein Wexler

Werke

BLOC

Vehicles projected audio throughout the neighbohood and quilts, made in Mr.
David Lyles quilting workshop, hung like flags.( photo: Carolina Performing
Arts) © Carolina Performing Arts — Vehicles projected audio throughout the neighbohood and quilts, made in Mr. David Lyles quilting workshop, hung like flags.( photo: Carolina Performing Arts) © Carolina Performing Arts

The quilt text is excerpted from Courtland Gilliam’s poem created from
Northside neighborhood oral history quotes. © R Stein Wexler — The quilt text is excerpted from Courtland Gilliam’s poem created from Northside neighborhood oral history quotes. © R Stein Wexler

Soil and daffodil installation © R Stein Wexler

Chapel Hill, North Carolina USA A trans-disciplinary social practice and community-centered project linking poetry, movement, soundscape, and visual installation. In partnership with the Marian Cheek Jackson Center and UNC’s Department of Geography and Environment, Culture Mill worked with UNC faculty and students to examine oral history archives from Chapel Hill’s historically Black Northside neighborhood. Drawing on voices articulating community flourishing and imaginations past, present and future, artists rendered archival fragments into an artistic map of a single city block at the threshold of Northside, downtown Chapel Hill, and Carrboro. Installation artist: R Stein Wexler Commissioning agency: Carolina Performing Arts, North Carolina Arts Council, and Durham Arts Council Collaborators: Marion Cheek Jackson Center (community organizing and oral histories), Tommy Noonan (Culture Mill, initiator and choreography), Dr. Betsy Olson (UNC Geography), Cortland Gilliam (poetry), Caitlyn Swett (sound).

Living Waters

Museum-goers explore the installation © R Stein Wexler

The installation is housed within an emergency shelter and includes 7 jerricans of water gathered along the Cape Fear River watershed, a video installation of the surface of that body of water, and an audio collage composed of recorded water rituals and the sounds of water. © Lauren Nichols

Raleigh, North Carolina USA Living Waters uses a diversity of rituals to call on the fundamental significance of water to human life. The piece invites cross-cultural solidarities in the face of humanitarian and climate catastrophes by exploring the unifying significance of water. The installation is housed within an emergency shelter and includes 7 jerricans of water gathered along the Cape Fear River watershed, a video installation of the surface of that body of water, and an audio collage composed of recorded water rituals and the sounds of water. Commissioning agency: North Carolina Museum of Art Collaborators: Kulsum Tasnif; Children of the Catawba, Coharie, Haliwa Saponi, Lumbee, Meherrin, Occaneechi, Sappony, Waccamaw Siouan Tribes recorded by Wyatt Radford and Travis Moffitt at UNC Pembroke's Museum of the Southeast American Indian; Ramya Kapadia; Jesse Huddleston and the CityWell United Methodist Church Music Team; Raleigh/Cary Community Chevra Kadisha including Bonnie Leach, Elyse Goldberg-Werner, Maryanne Klein, and Rachel Strauss; Kyle Sullivan - audio and video; Courtney Evans - fabrication; Alex Sauser-Monnig - fabrication

AndersErinnern

We closed the street which now runs where the senior home stood and redrew the walls, erecting exhibit panels to display materials, and invited neighbors to activate the space through a community meal. © R Stein Wexler

Many neighborhood volunteers participated in recording sessions during which they read the names and demographic data of the home’s former residents. This audio collage plays on loop at the site now. © Rico Prauss

The community has twice closed the street for a day and re-erected the walls of the former Jewish senior home. © R Stein Wexler

2020-present Berlin, Germany This multi-phased and ongoing collaborative counter-memorial at Haus der Statistik in central Berlin interrogates Germany’s exceptionalism around remembrance practices. The process engages with a Jewish senior home which stood at the site and was subsequently misused as a deportation camp by the National Socialists. As a result of this project, the district parliament has passed a resolution requiring the site to be permanently recognized. Current phases of the project are shaping that future lasting installation. Artistic direction: R Stein Wexler Collaborators: Dr. Akim Jah, Anja Malcharowitz, Kathrin Gerlof, Claudia Nier, Stefan Baier, Harebell Suzuki, Lorand Balazs Imre, Anatole Powilleit, Hye Jin Lee, Andreas Tiedemann Institutional support: Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt, Mitte Museum, Fachbereich Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte, Bezirksamt Mitte von Berlin, Bezirks Amt Mitte, Kultur Mitte, Haus der Statistik, Zusammenkunft Berlin eG, KMA Nachbarschafts Rat eV, Mollstraße Wohnungsgenossenschaft eG, Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung

Redacted

Gallery-goes anonymously submit their responses © Joanna Wilk

The city of Berlin and Berlin’s cultural sphere is internationally known for supporting free thought, academic rigor, and boundary-pushing artistic and cultural programming. However, freedom of speech and freedom to express views that do not align with the state are curtailed. This piece collaborates with the public to explore just how taboo is too taboo by redacting publicly submitted text. Gallery-goes respond anonymously to the question: “What would you think, say, or do if it weren’t taboo?” Exhibited in the frame of the exhibit “T4b00.” Commissioning agency: Bärenzwinger Gallerie Curators: Janine Pauleck and Vanessa Göppner

Schimb Cultural [Cultural Exchange]

The installation consisted of a programmed LED panel and a video collage of hundreds of LED panels used by currency exchanges across the city. Here the panel and projection are installed on the street-facing facade of Casa Zemstvei. © R Stein Wexler

Rather than listing currency exchange rates, the programmed LED panel listed media of cultural exchange including theater, video, photography, etc. © R Stein Wexler

The LED panel and video collage were also exhibited at an outdoor guerilla public space, Flat Space, where it is still in use to signal cultural programming there. © R Stein Wexler

Chișinău, Moldova Currency exchanges can be found throughout commercial zones in Chisinau. The visual language of these posted rates create at once a cacophony and also a monotony of plastic numerals and running LED pixels. While inter-currency exchange is written in bright lights across the city’s facades, in contrast intercultural exchange is much more subdued. This piece adopts the familiar visual language of one to express the other. Commissioning agency: CEC ArtsLink and Oberliht Association

Wahlfamilie

Recipes were hung around the space where the home will stand, claiming the area as one of queer and lesbian visibility and ownership. © R Stein Wexler

A joyful gathering celebrating notions of chosen home, those with walls and those without; and notions of chosen family, whether tied by blood or by love. © R Stein Wexler

Berlin, Germany In 2023, construction began on a queer and lesbian senior living facility, RuT Wohnen, at 9-11 Berolinstraße, Berlin, Germany. In the project, members of the RuT community were invited to recall a recipe which evokes a memory or feeling of “chosen family.” They wrote down the recipe on a piece of paper along with a description of the memory that dish evokes. On September 16th, participants cooked the dish and brought it to a community celebration at the future site of the RuT home. The recipes were printed on white fabric and hung around the site of the future home. Institutional support: Senatsverwaltung für Justiz, Vielfalt und Antidiskriminierung; Landesstelle für Gleichbehandlung gegen Diskriminierung; HMS Stiftung für queere Bewegungen; Fonds Soziokultur; RuT Wohnen e. V.

64.000 Stones

Krakow, Poland Investigating the tensions between the touristification of the Kazimierz neighborhood in Krakow and the historical trauma signified by the quarter. I will call on participants to step into the act of grief and mourning through the very tactile and personal performance of taking stones, like souvenirs, and then leaving them, in the act of Jewish remembrance. Curators: Curatorial Collective for Public Art, HaMiffal Art Center, Jewish Culture Festival, Krakow Documentation: E Dufaj and Meydad Eliyahu Funding: Foundation for Polish - German Cooperation; Goethe Institut, Krakow; Jewish Culture Festival, Krakow

Eckdaten

https://rsteinwexler.com/

Installation, Performance, Konzeptkunst, Partizipation

* 1990 (USA)

R Stein Wexler (she/her) is a public- and installation-artist trained as an urban planner.

Her projects are research-based, community-engaged, and critical of dominant structures. She creates place-based work in collaboration with local communities to tell (hi)stories. Shaped by empathy, deep listening, and authentic connection, her work results in gatherings, process documentation, immersive and interactive installations, workshops, exhibitions, and policy change. Her work often offers numerous points of entry, be it through sensory experiences, information-sharing, participation in the creation process, or community- and connection-building. The journey to the end of her work is just as important as the final product which often results in social as well as physical infrastructures.

Stein’s art has been supported by Raleigh Arts, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Berlin Senate for Culture and Social Cohesion, Mitte Museum, Kultur Mitte, CEC ArtsLink, as well as the Duke-Durham Partnership and the Mellon and Z. Smith Reynolds Foundations, among others. Stein was an artist in residence at documenta fifteen in Kassel, Germany and a German Chancellor’s Fellow at Berlin’s Center for Art and Urbanistics (ZK/U). Stein has taught public art at the Hayti Heritage Center and has guest lectured at colleges and universities.

Stein holds a Master’s in City and Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill where she received the Parker Fellowship and served as the co-editor in chief of the Carolina Planning Journal. Stein holds a BA with honors in English from University of California, Berkeley.

Vita

COMMISSIONS AND PROJECTS
Bloc (2025)
Community-centered oral history project linking poetry, movement, soundscape, and installation. In collaboration with artists Cortland Gilliam, Caitlyn Swett and Tommy Noonan.
Commissioned by Southern Futures at Carolina Performing Arts in partnership with The Jackson Center.

Open Form (2025)
Convening of artists and supporting institutions for an exploration of the local social practice ecosystem. In collaboration with artists Kamara Thomas, Denise Padilla, and Monét Noelle Marshall.
Commissioned by the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh NC USA.

Living Waters (2024-2025)
Research-based social practice project about ecology and water rituals across cultures.
Commissioned by the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh NC USA.

Redacted (2024-2025)
An exploration of the boundaries of the freedom of speech by redacting and projecting publicly submitted text. Exhibited in the frame of the exhibit “T4b00.”
Commissioned by Bärenzwinger Gallery, Berlin Germany.

Western Bus Rapid Transit Corridor Public Art Plan (2023-25)
Residency developing community engagement techniques and a public art plan for a new bus rapid transit corridor in Raleigh, NC USA.
Commissioned by Raleigh Arts.

It’s about time (2023-2025)
Installation at City-owned sites of recreation and leisure exploring time, how we spend it, how it’s commodified, sought after, wasted, and lost.
Commissioned by Raleigh Arts.

AndersErinnern [An other remembrance] (2020-present)
Ongoing collaborative counter-memorial at Haus der Statistik in central Berlin, DE.
Commissioned by Berlin Senat für Kultur und Europa and Mollstraße Wohnungsgenossenschaft eG.

Quiet Cartographies - Durham (2024)
Collective mapping installation of silenced or erased memories and stories across Durham, NC USA.
Commissioned for “Death Planted a Garden” exhibit and funded by NC Humanities.

Schimb Cultural [Cultural Exchange] (2023)
A series of LED display and video installations inspired by the proliferation of currency exchange shops in central Chisinau, MD. Executed while in residence at Oberliht Association in the frame of CECArtsLink Art Prospect residency.

Quiet Cartographies - Chisinau (2023)
Series of workshops and collaborative mapping of public spaces in Chisinau, MD investigating the spaces’ intended and actual uses.
Executed while in residence at Oberliht Association in the frame of CECArtsLink Art Prospect residency.

Stir Up Trouble (2023)
Meal, facilitated conversation, and exhibit of documentation with the alternative arts scene in Chisinau, MD.
Executed in collaboration with Ilkin Huseynov while in residence at Oberliht Association in the frame of CECArtsLink Art Prospect residency.

Our Streets Southside (2022-2023)
Award-winning neighborhood safety intervention in the rapidly gentrifying and particularly violent Southside neighborhood in Durham.
Commissioned by the Duke-Durham Partnership in Durham, NC USA.

Hayti/Southside History Project (2022)
Planning grant to develop participatory remembrance interventions in public space in Durham, NC USA. In collaboration with the Hayti Heritage Center, Stephen Hayes, and Dare Coulter.
Commissioned by the Mellon and Z Smith Reynolds Foundations.

Chicago Monuments Project (2022)
Analyzed qualitative data, developed high-level summaries for the final report, and managed project implementation.
Sub-consultant to Metris Arts Consulting.

Wahlfamilie [Chosen Family] (2022)
Installation and ritual celebrating queer family and activism.
Commissioned by RuT-Frauen Kultur und Wohnen in Berlin, DE.

64.000 Stones (2021)
Participatory counter-memorial in historically Jewish and current tourist district, Kazimierz.
Commissioned by the Jewish Culture Festival, Krakow, PL.

EXHIBITIONS AND HONORS
2024-2025 Solo exhibition, Living Waters, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC USA
2024-2025 Group exhibit, T4b00, Bärenzwinger, Berlin, DE
2024 Group exhibit, Death Planted a Garden, Queen St Magic Boat, Durham, NC USA
2024 Group exhibit, Echos der Bruderländer, HKW, Berlin, DE
2024 Group exhibit, Open Haus, ZK/U, Berlin, DE
2024 Artist in Residence, ZK/U, Berlin, DE
2023 Group exhibit, Under one Leaking Roof, Casa Zemstvei, Chisinau, MD
2023 Artist in Residence, ArtProspect + CEC ArtsLink, Chisinau, MD
2022 Group exhibit, Open Haus, ZK/U, Berlin, DE
2022 Artist in Residence, CAMP Notes on Education documenta fifteen, Kassel, DE
2020-22 German Chancellor’s Fellow, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Berlin, DE

PRESENTATIONS, TEACHING, AND PUBLICATIONS
2025 | Artist talk. North Carolina Museum of Art. Raleigh, NC USA
2024 | Artist talk. University of North Carolina. Chapel Hill, NC USA
2024 | Artist talk. George Mason University. Fairfax, VA USA
2024 | Artist talk. North Carolina Museum of Art. Raleigh, NC USA
2023-2024 | Youth Arts Intensive instructor. Hayti Heritage Center. Durham, NC USA
2023 | Artist talk. Quiet Cartographies. Chisinau, MD.
2022 | Lecture. Making Erased Histories Visible. Goethe Institute: Monuments of the Future? Berlin, DE.
2022 | One Site, Layered Histories. Monument Lab Bulletin. (With K Gerlof)
2022 | Lecture. Keeping Public Memory Alive. TEDx Kanzlerpark. Berlin, DE.
2021 | Lecture. Public Art: What is it Good for? Post-Carbon Cities of Tomorrow Alumni Network. Virtual.
2019 | Lecture. This Economy and Placemaking: I’m just a soul whose intentions are good. Oh Lord, please
don’t let me be misunderstood. Placemaking Week. Chattanooga, TN USA.
2019 | Lecture. Leveraging Local Assets for Prosperity. National Consortium for Creative Placemaking:
Southeast Conference. Columbia, SC USA.