Karen Schiff

Karen Schiff, Word Snake, 2014, Watercolor, Rag Paper, Graphite

2014

Karen Schiff is an artist and wordsmith based in New York. She has always been a reader as well as a visual artist. Her drawings, paintings, installations, and performances combine these pursuits by wondering about our conceptual frameworks for linguistic and physical experience. Schiff’s work has been shown at galleries such as BravinLee Programs and Danese Gallery, both in New York City and Fred Giampietro Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut. Her artwork (and writing) was part of “Art = Text = Art” at museums, including the Zimmerli Museum of Art at Rutgers University and the Hafnarborg Art Museum in Iceland. Schiff is a Lecturer in Graduate Studies at the Rhode Island School of Design. She holds an MFA in Studio Art (School of the Museum of Fine Arts / Boston, 2006), and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory (University of Pennsylvania, 1998). Recently, Schiff has published in Art in America and Hyperallergic Weekend, as well as for the blog she co-edits with an artist she met at a Yaddo studio residency, Wallscrawler. Her writings tend toward issues of art and language, artist Agnes Martin, and complexities of identity. Schiff's artworks are held in public, private and corporate collections, such as the Kramarsky Collection (NYC), the Colby College Museum of Art (Maine), and the MCS Collection of Contemporary Drawing (Portugal).