www.karenwhitman.net
Karen Whitman was born in New York City, grew up in its suburbs, and has lived in Woodstock, N.Y. since 1994. She has a BFA in Printmaking from SUNY at Buffalo, and also studied at The School of Visual Arts, Parsons School of Design, Woodstock School of Art, and The Art Students League of New York. She is a member of the Society of American Graphic Artists and Allied Artists of America and has won numerous awards for her prints, including seven medals of honor from national juried exhibitions through Allied Artists of America, The National Association of Women Artists, The Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club, and Allied Artists of America. Karen is listed in Who’s Who in American Art, and was featured in American Artist Magazine in December 2002, and in Journal of The Print World in October 2019. Also in 2019, she was a recipient of the Clark Hulings Fund Art-Business Accelerator Grant. She will be having a solo exhibition at The Woodstock Artists Association and Museum from Nov. 22, opening with an artist talk at 3PM, continuing through Dec. 28, 2025.
Whitman’s prints can be found in the collections of The British Museum in London, The Institute of Fine Arts in Taiwan, The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art in New Paltz, NY, The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick, NJ, The Portland Art Museum in Oregon, The R. W. Norton Art Gallery in Shreveport, LA, among others. In New York City, her work is in the collections of The Museum of The City of New York, The New-York Historical Society, The New York Public Library and The New York Transit Museum. She has also been exhibited internationally in Ireland, Australia and Taiwan.
Whitman’s prints express an exuberance and affection for city life and maintains a close connection with New York City. She is inspired by its architecture, people and all the other creatures that inhabit the metropolis, including the buildings, with which she imbues as much life as those that breathe the city’s air. Whitman chooses a location that she finds exciting and is usually complex, from which she creates a drawing that will be a springboard for a black and white print. She often includes people interacting with their environments to create a world and tell a story, weaving them into energetic elements with contrasting patterns and textures, leading the eye from one vignette to another, each telling its own tale of the urban experience. She aims to portray the city as positive, accessible, and beautiful, even playful; and yet, inadvertently, seems to convey a sense of mystery which, at times, makes it a challenge to differentiate between whimsy and foreboding. The city is all these things at once, which is why it inspires her and is the primary subject of her work.
