Keith Garubba
Bethlehem, PA
Ink-stained optimist. Printmaker, marbler, and educator for 20 years. Giving serious craft a playful punch.
Message
Keith Garubba is a printmaker, educator, and ink-stained optimist living and working in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. His work uses abstraction to charge familiar symbols with new meaning, made for deep-thinking daydreamers who like their art with a little mythology and a lot of soul.
Garubba grew up in Scranton surrounded by brothers who loved comics, collaboration, and making things. Drawing became his voice early, and he never really put it down. He studied visual arts at Keystone College, graduating as Outstanding Graduate in 2010, before earning his MFA from The Ohio State University in 2014, where contemporary ideas cracked his work wide open in the best possible way. Returning to Pennsylvania, he planted roots in the Lehigh Valley, where he was named Emerging Artist of the Year by the Allentown Arts Commission in 2016.
Since then, Garubba has built a creative life that refuses to stay in one lane. He exhibits regularly across the US, served four years as President of the Printmakers Society of the Lehigh Valley, and was honored as an Artist in Residence at the International Print Center of New York. His studio practice spans printmaking, glass, paint, and multimedia, always restless, always searching.
In 2024 he opened Whistling Studios in Bethlehem, a boutique art studio where he teaches paper marbling, printmaking, and book arts to students of all levels. It’s where serious craft gets a playful punch, and where beginners discover they were artists all along.
Statement
I have come to believe that patterns speak, not to the eye, but to something quieter underneath it.
My career has been spent chasing those moments, in the geometry of religious architecture, in the quiet logic of science laboratories, in the hypnotic rhythm of the night highway. These are not random subjects. They are places where the visible world grows thin, and something harder to name begins to show through.
My work begins there, pulling iconic symbols from their original context, restaging them until they vibrate with new meaning. I am not interested in answers. I am interested in the charged silence where a daydreamer stops, looks twice, and walks away uplifted, mind-shifted, changed.
Whether in print, paint, glass, or collage, I am always looking for the same thing: the quiet place where an ordinary surface cracks open, and something sacred slips through.
Pattern is the language the soul learned first.