About Karen Ami

Discovery

Karen Ami was born in Chicago, raised in Indiana and Illinois. She attended The Boston Museum School, Tufts University (BFA, 1986) and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA, 1995) majoring in ceramics and sculpture. In 2005, she founded The Chicago Mosaic School the first and only Not-For-Profit school for Mosaic Arts Education outside of Europe. She is President Emeritus of The Society of American Mosaic Artists, teaches and lectures internationally and is a sought after curator of contemporary mosaic exhibitions. She exhibits her own artwork in venues both here and abroad. She was awarded first prize in the Prix Picassiette International Exhibition in 2014. In 2015, her work "TEN" was acquired by The Museum of Bibical Art, Dallas Texas for their permanent collection. Her work can be seen in public and private collections around the world.

Karen Ami’s works are a continuing inquiry of about love, life, family and eternity. Her graphic compositions combine rich surfaces and bio-morphic forms, exposing complex and primitive stories of transformation and regeneration. The destruction and repair in Ami’s unique process is a metaphor for the life cycle and how to create wholeness is a broken world. Ami has developed a narrative language that uniquely combines a fascination with drawing, mosaic, writing, ceramic and carving. Her black and white mosaics merge references to written stories and artifacts that reveal layers of memory and experience.

Ami draws inspiration from Pre-Columbian and Mesoamerican sculpture, underground comic books, African and oceanic masks, and Chicago Imagist painters. She creates unique drawings and writings in clay and breaks them apart- reconstructing and reassembling pieces to create a new story and composition. This is a process of deconstruction and the rebuilding is part of her additive method of mosaic. The resulting works are an outcome of a continual journey of exploration and investigation.

Curriculum Vitae

My art practice and identity are intertwined through a series of breaks and separations, embodied through a matricentric lens. Subsequently, my studio process and resulting artworks explore the fragmentation of female identities through deconstruction and the reworking of personalised ‘ostraca’, or inscribed shards. Through this autological practice, I focus on the recurring themes of family brokenness, displacement, and reunion within the historical framing of a post-holocaust community, part of my ongoing art research. My art is a mechanism to connect, transform and adapt - an intersection of the philosophies of Kintsugi and the Bricoleur.

I was born to a survivor and became a survivor myself, incorporating scratches and cuts, drawing fragments and embedded inscriptions as part of an additive and investigative method that gives purpose to stories of regeneration. From brokenness, the scars of repair in my art process hold both power and memory. I explore themes connected to maternal empowerment, inspired by anatomy, nature, separation, decay, and rebirth. While contemporary life is characterised by a sequence of fleeting moments and disconnected associations, these constructions become a unified space for contemplation of the female identity, trans-generational familial memory, and the metamorphic aspects of motherhood.

My practice combines my passions for drawing, carving, sculpture, and mosaic, resulting in palpable graphic stories and embedded poetry in textural sculptural forms and plaques. This creative process has been a study and exploration that has evolved through years of experimentation and research. Creating art using these elements - gathering images, words, materials, and textures - satisfies my need to create a visual union to make things whole. This mosaic of art practice enables my necessity and desire to bring a sense of order out of chaos.

Karen Ami

Chicago , IL

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