Karen Ami
Karen Ami is a visual artist, curator, and educator from Chicago. She is a graduate of The Boston Museum School, Tufts University (BFA) and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA) majoring in ceramics and sculpture. She is the Founder of The Chicago Mosaic School, the first and only center for academically oriented Mosaic Arts Education outside of Europe. Her current work combines rich surfaces and fecund forms that are at once fragmented and yet whole. Through her process of destruction and repair, Ami’s muliebral narratives transform themes of brokenness, trauma and memory into markers of survival.
Research Interest
In ‘A Farewell To Arms’, Ernest Hemingway wrote, "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places.” I will illustrate how survivors, particularly through a process of mending, can reinvent and redefine and empower a wounded maternal lineage. My response to this brokenness and subsequently, survival, is to delve into the maternal memory of generational adversity through the repaired ‘artefacts’ of my studio practice. My work is a visual documentation of love and connection in familial and peripheral relationships, acceptance of the imperfect through words, drawing, shards, fragments, stone, and mortar. This tactile, primal, intuitive and obsessive process is a natural format for finding hope and beauty in the broken can transcend the roots of the traditions of Roman, Byzantine and Post-War mosaic works.