About

Karen Rose has been a painter for over 30 years in New York City, San Francisco, and Raleigh. She holds a BA from UC Berkeley and an MFA from The School of Visual Arts. She has been painting an ongoing series of landscapes 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 near the border as reference. She expanded this series to encompass the Spaghetti Westerns filmed in Spain to stand in for Mexico and worked on these during her printmaking residency in Barcelona. She also traveled in Morocco for 2 weeks with 40 teachers, 3 rabbis and a Palestinian peace activist who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She then painted the Atlas Mountains and other areas in Morocco. Subsequently, Rose painted the Atlas Mountains and other areas in Morocco and then produced a series of landscapes of conflict infused with textile design. She is currently reimagining the Bay Area before “Settlement” through pristine landscapes omitting present infrastructure. Karen Rose teaches Drawing/Mixed Media at the Urban School of San Francisco and lives and paints in both Richmond, CA and Raleigh, NC.