The Ohio Artist Registry (OAR) is an exciting opportunity for artists to share their work, connect with the creative community, and establish an online presence—all on a free, virtual platform! The OAR encourages artists working in all art forms, throughout Ohio and beyond, to create a profile, which allows them to better promote themselves and their work. Being listed in the OAR provides artists with new opportunities to share their work with clients, galleries, patrons, and audiences. A listing in the OAR does not confer an endorsement, approval, or verification by the Ohio Arts Council.
For more information, contact Kathy Signorino, artist programs director, at kathy.signorino@oac.ohio.gov or 614-728-6140.
2024 Ohio Artist Registry Juried Exhibition
Karen Albanese Campbell
ArtistColumbus Ohio 43214 United States Cell Phone: 6146340418 Website: https://karenalbanesecampbell.com/home.html
Bio
Karen Albanese Campbell is an award-winning painter and printmaker creating narrative art that is personal and expressionistic. Described as “rich and diverse,” her art is marked by the symbolic relationships she creates between time-traveling human figures and abstracted landscapes. Thoroughly researching her ideas that are rooted in current events, especially the crisis of displaced people around the world, the artist layers them with her experiences, personal imagery and memory through imagination. Her imagery and style can be firmly representational, is often highly patterned and freely takes on abstract qualities. This allows her to create fluid transitional spaces to express her ideas about empathy and the search for belonging.
The artist is originally from Syracuse, NY, and was raised in an Italian-American family. Karen earned her BFA in painting from Boston University, being part of the first generation of her family to attend college. Albanese Campbell’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including Northern Illinois University Art Museum; Tubac Center for the Arts; Allegheny Arts Council; Dallas, TX; Annapolis, MD; Awagami Paper Factory in Japan and many venues around Ohio. She also exhibited her series of paintings “The Travelers” at ArtPrize 2021, in Grand Rapids, MI. Recent solo exhibitions include The James Cancer Hospital Art Gallery at The Ohio State University, Wehrle Gallery at Ohio Dominican University, Stow Monroe Public Library in Akron, OH and The Grange Insurance Art at the Audubon in Columbus, OH. Upcoming solo exhibitions include The Dairy Barn in Athens, OH. She has taught color theory at an international quilt conference in Greece and printmaking workshops at Phoenix Rising Printmaking Cooperative. Her large woodcut print “Moment of Silence”, inspired by the wild poppies that grow in the Syrian countryside and are symbolic of the innocent victims of war, is in the permanent collection of the Columbus Museum of Art. She has been awarded best in show twice at the Annual Ohio Exhibit at the Zanesville Art Museum, in two different categories: textiles and prints. She has been awarded grants from the Greater Columbus Arts Council, including a “Big Ideas” grant which funded her project in 2021 called “Just Walls Public Art” in which she is creating and installing art in social service agency waiting rooms. She has participated in artist residencies at the Jerome Art Center in AZ and at InCahoots in Petaluma, CA in 2024. She was recently chosen to participate in a cultural exchange with printmakers in Havana, Cuba, October 2023. The artist has public art installations at WIC (Women, Infants and Children) Clinics, The Columbus Metropolitan Library Reynoldsburg branch (coming up) and The Vineyard Community Center, all in Columbus, OH. Albanese Campbell is the current president of Phoenix Rising Printmaking Cooperative in Columbus, OH.
Artist Statement
My artistic practice includes prints, paintings and quilts that begin with realistic imagery to create accessible art experiences. Iconic human shapes, disguised by patterns and color, layered with metaphorical landscapes and symbology, tell stories about fixing what is broken and finding what is lost as a result of personal displacement. Printmaking allows me to create layered images, painting invites immediacy of expression and quilting indulges my love for geometry and pattern.
I love to travel and have always been fascinated by world cultures. For several years my work has been about migrants and refugees, and the experience of displacement; but now I see I’ve been searching for my own story all along because I never had a strong sense of belonging and, on a deep level, I felt great empathy for displaced people. I am taking my art in a new direction as I begin to explore my Italian ancestry, reaching into the past to understand and fill in blanks. I wonder who among my ancestors survived the 1908 earthquake and tsunami in southern Italy and what they chose to carry with them when they left home. In this new direction for my art, I am creating installation-sized paper trees and human figures covered with text, maps and imagery using printmaking. They are metaphors for the challenges faced when protecting life through dangerous spaces. I see this new series as a natural next step in the work I have been creating, not a departure. I am a time traveler; my art freely reaches into a big bowl of history and imagery to create multi layered new work.