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

2014

About the Item

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. For “Scribing the Void,” Schiff is showing works on paper from 2014 through the present. In single lines of blank “writing,” her forms suggest a curious union between a snake and some leaning planks from a Serra sculpture. In other drawings these shapes form irregular grids, which Schiff associates with fields of language. (Texts used to be made from rectangular lead “sorts” of individual letters, compressed into metal frames for letterpress printing, but our experience of immersion in language is not so tight or regularly angled.) Schiff’s most recent drawings show these fields getting more irregular, and more spatially confounding. She likes to think about critic Jan Verwoert’s idea that the writer is immersed in language like a cow stands cooling in a pond; she also stays aware of a film on visualizing the fourth dimension which she first saw in 1985. In addition to this exhibition at ODETTA (in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn), 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 has also created online projects for the College Art Association’s Art Journal, such as “Counter to Type,” an invited artist’s project that included drawings that play with the journal’s page layouts, an essay, and an online video. Schiff is a Lecturer in Graduate Studies at the Rhode Island School of Design. She holds an M.F.A. 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 she 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. Her 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).
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Artist CV: EDUCATION Master of Fine Arts in Painting Bard College 1986 Bachelor of Science in Art History State University College at New Paltz 1977 Additional Study: New York Studio School (Drawing Marathons) Columbia University, School of Architecture Women’s Studio Workshop TEACHING Professor of Studio Art, Department of Art and Art History, Marist College, Poughkeepsie, NY Coordinator, Interior Design Program, Florence, Italy campus 1992-present AWARDS NYFA Fellowship in Painting 2018 Invitational Award for Outstanding Contemporary Talent, University of Bridgeport, CT 2000 Purchase Prize, “11th National Juried Exhibition” College of Notre Dame of Maryland, Baltimore 1999 First Prize, “Women in the Visual Arts ‘95” Erector Square Gallery, New Haven, CT 1995 Joseph A. Cain Memorial Purchase Award for Sculpture Del Mar College, Corpus Christi, TX 1994 Honorable Mention, “National Juried Exhibition” University of Bridgeport, CT 1993 Individual Artists Fellowship in Sculpture Dutchess Arts Fund 1992/93 Tallix, Morris, Singer Internship in Sculpture Tallix Foundry, Beacon, NY 1990/91 MEMBERSHIP Royal British Society of Sculptors SELECTED JURIED/INVITATIONAL EXHIBITIONS 2020 “edu: Art Faculty of the Hudson Valley”, Hudson Valley MOCA, Peekskill, NY 2019 “Contemporary Abstraction”, Carrie Haddad Gallery, Hudson, NY “Mixed Media”, SITE Gallery, Brooklyn, NY 2018 “JuxtaPositions”, The Painting Center, New York, NY “Peculiar Rarities”, Carrie Haddad Gallery, Hudson, NY 2017 “Interlock: Color and Contrast in Abstraction”, Carrie Haddad Gallery, Hudson, NY “Donise English: Encaustics”, Catskill Art Society, Livingston Manor, NY 2016 “Let’s Stay in Touch”, Howard County Center for the Arts, Ellicott City, MD “Under, Over, After Over”, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY 2015 “Off the Grid”, Arts & Culture Program, Albany International Airport, Albany, NY “Gridspace”, KMOCA, Kingston, NY “Abstraction”, Carrie Haddad Gallery, Hudson, NY “Assuming Identity”, NY Institute of Technology, New York, NY 2013 “Modern Artists”, Carrie Haddad Gallery, Hudson, NY “Artists of the Mohawk-Hudson Region”, The Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, NY Stone Canoe/Community Folk Art Center, Syracuse, NY 2012 New York Institute of Technology, New York, NY “Contemporary Painters (Who Just Happen To Be Women)”, Carrie Haddad Gallery, Hudson, NY “Strange Glue: Collage at 100”, Cambridge School, Weston, MA “Dear Mother Nature”, Dorsky Museum, SUNY New Paltz, NY “Fresher Paint”, Rockland Center for the Arts, Nyack, NY Courthouse Gallery, Lake George Arts Project, Lake George, NY 2011 “Process+Content: Donise English”, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY “Donise English-Paintings”,Orange County Community College, Newburgh, NY “Gender Matters/Matters of Gender”, Freedman Gallery, Albright College, Reading, PA 2010 Carrie Haddad Gallery, Hudson, NY “Encaustics: Wax and Image”, Westchester Community College, White Plains, NY “Dots, Lines and Figures”, Carrie Haddad Gallery, Hudson, NY “Spring Awakening”, NY Institute of Technology, New York, NY “Clay City Dreams”, NY Institute of Technology, New York, NY “Texture,Pattern, Fragment”, Krause Gallery, Moses Brown School, Providence, RI 2009 “Collage”, NY Institute of Technology, New York, NY “Working in Wax”, Bedford Gallery, Walnut Creek, CA “Encaustic 2009”, College of New Rochelle, NY “Three Artists”, Carrie Haddad Gallery, Hudson, NY “Convergence: The Human Experience”,Howard County Center for the Arts, MD 2008 “Suckers and Biters: Love, Lollipops, and Exquisite Corpse” Chashama Gallery, New York, NY Carrie Haddad Gallery, Hudson NY 2007 “Patterns and Light”, Blue Hill Gallery, Blue Hill, ME “Suckers and Biters”, AG Gallery, Brooklyn, NY 2006 “100 Artists, 100 Watercolors”, Jeannie Freilich Fine Art, New York, NY “On/Of Paper”,Kirkland Art Center, Clinton, NY “The Love Show”, Manchester Community College, Manchester, CT 2005 The Soap Factory, Minneapolis, MN “Small Tales”, Valdosta State University, Georgia National Juried Exhibition,Art Institute and Gallery Salisbury, MD, Juror: Stephen Haller “Greed, Envy, Jealousy, Fear”, TSL Warehouse, Hudson, NY 2004 “Women in the Middle: Borders, Barriers, Intersections” University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee “Girl Art Now”,Hera Gallery, Wakefield, RI 3 Person Exhibition, Monterey Peninsula College, Monterey, CA “The Feminine Eye”, Bradley University, Peoria, IL “Women Painting Women”, McNeese State University, Lake Charles, LA “Thought Patterns”, Kent Place Gallery, Summit, NJ “Surface, Matter and Artifice”, Dutchess Community College Art Gallery Poughkeepsie, NY 2003 “Beefcake/Cheesecake”,Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Ana, CA,Juror: Jamie Wilson, Curator Halpert Bienniel, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC Juror: Jeff Fleming, Senior Curator, Des Moines Art Center “The Great White Oak”, Garrison Art Center, Garrison, NY Carrie Haddad Gallery, Hudson, NY 2002 “Cat Calls”, Red Clay Arts, Brooklyn “Hudson Valley Regional”, SUNY New Paltz Juror: Sydney Jenkins, Director, Ramapo College Art Galleries 2001 One-Person Exhibition, Davis and Hall Gallery, Hudson, NY “Beyond the Surface”, Womanmade Gallery, Chicago One-Person Exhibition, Garrison Art Center, Garrison, NY 2000 “Vision 2000...
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