I create expressionistic narrative art. Visual metaphors and imagination are essential partners throughout my paintings, prints and art quilts. My style is fluid: it can be firmly representational, is often highly patterned and freely takes abstract directions. I have a particular love for working with the human figure, and these forms often feel like time-travelers with symbolic relationships to abstracted landscapes and personal artifacts. The figures and ideas in my art loosely mingle with one another in transitional spaces, not bound by time or location. My art expresses ideas surrounding origin, dislocation and displacement. As my work developed, I realized I was also searching for my own story. I use my art making to explore what might have happened to my family since facts are lost to distance, time and decay. I never met my grandparents but I now find inspiration in sketchy family stories, oral histories and all that can be inferred through historical research, constructing a very personal visual vocabulary with the fragments and scraps I possess.
Karen Albanese Campbell is an award-winning printmaker, painter and art quilter. She was curated into the 15th Havana (Cuba) Biennial, 2024-25. She has exhibited internationally in Japan and Havana, Cuba and nationally in juried group exhibits. She has had solo exhibits at The James Cancer Hospital Art Gallery, The Dairy Barn Art Center in Athens, OH and at Wehrle Gallery at Ohio Dominican University. She exhibited at ArtPrize 2021, in Grand Rapids, MI. She was awarded a Greater Columbus Arts Council “Big Ideas” grant and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Award to fund her 2021 project “Just Walls Public Art” to create art for social service agency waiting rooms. Artist residencies include InCahoots in Petaluma, CA. She was chosen to participate in a cultural exchange with printmakers in Havana, Cuba at Taller Experimental de Grafika in 2023, 2024, and 2025. She is in the permanent collection of the Columbus Museum of Art and Columbus Metropolitan Library. Karen teaches printmaking at Phoenix Rising Printmaking Cooperative in Columbus and at the Chautauqua Institute in NY. Karen earned her BFA from Boston University, being one of the first of her Italian-American family to attend college. Albanese Campbell is the current president of Phoenix Rising Printmaking Cooperative. Karen is represented by Hammond Harkins Gallery in Columbus, OH.