Emily Budd

Emily Budd’s sculptural practice seeks queer futurity and place-making through reformative monuments, artifacts, fossils and memorials. Having a background in bronze casting and paleontology, her work engages with time scale as it relates to material temporality and transformation. Budd’s practice pushes the medium and implodes at the intersections of traditional craft, recycled metal, fossil preservation, queer archives and ancestry, and renewal through material and community alchemy. Her project, Memorial for Queer Rhyolite, a temporary monument to dreams in the dust, marks an AIDS-era queer utopian effort in a Nevada ghost town and has been recognized by Nevada Humanities, The Washington Post, and Discovery Channel’s Mysteries of the Abandoned: Hidden America. Her essay, Cruising the Monuments of the Outskirts Las Vegas (After Smithson), was recently published in the ecoartspace book The New Geologic Epoch. Budd has exhibited throughout the US including at SOMArts Cultural Center and Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco, Site:Brooklyn, the Barrick Museum of Art in Las Vegas, the University of Arizona in Tucson and SEED Lab at the Anchorage Museum. Budd leads the expanding community project, Aluminati, which materializes the transformative and collaborative power of foundry craft to solidify and empower equitable change.