About

Karen Rose is a half Mexican artist with a BA from UC Berkeley and an MFA from The School of Visual Arts in New York. Her practice includes a printmaking residency at La Maldita Estampa in Barcelona, supported by a North Carolina arts grant. She was also awarded a Kivunim Fellowship to Morocco, where she studied inter-religious and cross-cultural coexistence with 40 educators, 3 rabbis, and a Bedouin Palestinian peace activist. A visual essay of her 42-foot painting, "San Francisco North Bay 360 Degree View: A physical piece of virtual reality," will be published in the Panoramic & Immersive Media Studies Yearbook for the International Panorama Council this year. She has had solo shows at Diamante Arts & Cultural Center, Triangle Cultural Arts, Eyes on Main Street, The Edge Gallery, the Durham Convention Center and the NC Botanical Gardens in North Carolina, and at Gallery Route One in California. She is a member of the Inter-Latin American Artist Collective of North Carolina and her painting, Alligator Alcatraz, will be in the upcoming NC Artists Exhibition.

Her paintings celebrate landscape and a Mexican sensibility of color while undertaking themes of immigration. She is documenting the landscapes of all the immigration detention centers in the country based on historical satellite and street view imagery before the centers were built. Concurrently she is painting lowriders and border walls based on her photos in Tijuana, Mexico. Her Mexican American grandparents were lifelong farmworkers in the San Joaquin Valley and she has been exhibiting a series of farm paintings on both coasts in their honor. Her photography and video work are an important part of her practice. Rose teaches art at Urban School of San Francisco and recently completed an art residency at Guadalupe Elementary through SFArtsEd.