R Stein Wexler (she/her) is a public artist and urban planner. She is currently producing Our Streets Southside and On Time in North Carolina and Fügung des Schicksals in Berlin, Germany.

Stein’s work spans research, creative placemaking, and process-based public space interventions. Stein’s projects are community-engaged and critical of dominant structures. Shaped by needs and constraints, her work results in gatherings, process documentation, immersive and interactive installations, workshops, and/or exhibitions. A key characteristic of her work is offering numerous points of entry to a project: be it through sensory experiences, information-sharing, participation in the creation process, or community- and connection-building.

As a public artist, Stein is passionate about co-creating projects with communities that examine current political and social challenges. Her current work includes developing a series of installations investigating decolonial temporalities at sites of recreation and leisure in Raleigh, NC, public space story-telling initiative in Durham, NC’s Hayti and Southside neighborhoods, and a series of neighborhood safety interventions in Durham. She has developed an ongoing multi-phase remembrance process in Berlin, Germany, a remembrance project in Krakow, and commissions by community groups in Berlin. Her public art has been supported by Raleigh Arts, the Berlin Senate for Culture and Europe as well as the Duke-Durham Partnership and the Mellon and Z. Smith Reynolds Foundations. 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’s urban planning and consulting practice includes leadership and policy experience developing public art, placemaking, and economic development projects, programs, and policies. Durham’s Mayor appointed her to lead the city’s task force on developing the downtown outdoor dining plan during the pandemic; she developed and directed a public space activation granting program in downtown Durham; and she’s shaped city-level culture and public space policies on the Durham Cultural Advisory Board.

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 of the Carolina Planning Journal. Stein holds a BA with honors in English from University of California, Berkeley. She lives between Berlin, Germany and Durham, NC USA.

Contact Stein to discuss commission, collaboration, and consulting opportunities.