Karen Schiff

Artist-writer, editor, occasional professor
United States °1967
research interests: Agnes Martin, Pablo Picasso (early career), artistic research, word and image, studio practice
affiliation: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2021-22)
en

While I am a studio artist, I have also been a scholar, and I am now bringing these trainings together. My current project, which began in 2016, is to reinterpret Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). In 2021-23, I was a resident critic in the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; one of the essays I wrote there, "Gender Complexity in Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: The Precedent of the Sleeping Hermaphroditus Sculpture," has been published at Boletín de Arte in a special issue commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Picasso's death. I am currently serving as a project editor for the chair of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where I also will be teaching Freehand Drawing.  Artworks and writings are archived at www.karen-schiff.com.

research

research expositions

  • Viral Drawings: Transmission BC / QT / AV (2021) author(s): Karen Schiff published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
    This exposition reflects on the drawings I was making at different stages during the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially they are compared to my long-term practice of making abstract drawings patterned on language, and then they are used to theorize a "poetics of transmission." This framework is discussed in relation both to how the virus is transmitted and to how ideas are created and circulated. Various analytical interpretations of the drawings are considered. At some moments, I treat dots in the drawings like ideas or virus particles; at other moments, the strategies I use for connecting the dots represent the process of generating ideas. The drawings become tools for the "research" of thinking through physical and intellectual contagion.
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