About

Karen Rose has been a painter for over 30 years in New York City, San Francisco, and Raleigh. She has been painting an ongoing series of landscapes on both sides of the Mexican border, with the notion that landscapes transcend borders. Her identity and heritage straddle these places, as a half Mexican. A cancelled trip to the Mojave Desert during the pandemic led her to use film stills of movies shot in the area as reference. She expanded this series to encompass the Spaghetti Westerns shot in Spain to stand in for Mexico and worked on these during her printmaking residency in Barcelona this summer. She also traveled in Morocco for 2 weeks with 40 teachers, 20 from Jewish schools, 3 rabbis and a Palestinian peace activist who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She has painted the Atlas Mountains and other areas and is currently working on border paintings of Israel/Gaza.