Rachel Trusty


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Contact Info

318B Blake Hall
Lawrence

Biography

In July 2022, Rachel Trusty successfully defended her dissertation, "Embodiment and Agency within the Artistic Genre of Queer Abstraction." She graduated in December 2022 and is now working as a visiting assistant professor in the Women's and Gender Studies department at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA. To support her research at KU, Trusty was awarded the Travel Research Grant by the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, which she used to conduct interviews and participant observations at Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, AR in October. Trusty presented her doctoral research at two conferences: the Embodied Posthumanisms Conference at the University of Warwick, UK and the Dismantling the Body: Possibilities and Limitations in Art Making Symposium at the University of Washington.

In coordination with the Spencer Museum of Art on the University of Kansas campus, Rachel Trusty curated Mining the Gap in May, an exhibition of work from the permanent collection that addressed the gap between queer and feminist theories. This exhibition coordinated with the class Feminist and LGBT+ Art History that Trusty created and taught in spring 2022. As a visual artist, Trusty participated in several group art exhibitions in 2022 including Each Other at Aplomb Gallery in Dover, NM, Beyond Craft at the Chico Art Center in Chico, CA, Tender with the Other at the Wavelength Gallery in Chattanooga, TN, Growing up Queer in the South at the Greenville Museum of Art in Greenville, NC, and Queer at the Fenix Gallery in Fayetteville, AR. Trusty's work was also included in Issue #28 of The Museum of Americana.