Kara Maria

Background

Kara Maria was born on December 6, 1968, in Binghamton, New York, United States.

Education

Kara Maria attended music conservatory’s college on the East Coast, and studied in Europe for a year.

In 1990, Maria entered the University of California, Berkeley where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in Art Practice with honors three years later. It was followed by a Master of Arts degree in 1998.

Career

Since the beginning of her career at the end of the 1990s, Kara Maria has had many solo exhibitions and has participated in many group shows around the United States, like the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, the Cantor Center at Stanford University, the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, the Katonah Museum of Art in New York, and elsewhere.

In 2003, Maria followed the Djerassi Artists Residency program. She has also been an artist in residence at the Montalvo Arts Center from 2015 to 2016, and at the de Young’s Artist Studio.

Kara Maria has also tried herself in academics as a lector and adjunct faculty in a number of Californian institutions like San Francisco State University, San Francisco School of the Arts, Santa Clara University, University of California, and California College of the Arts among others.

Nowadays, the artist lives and works in San Francisco. The latest project of Maria is aimed to draw attention to the problem of disappearing animals depicting the small portraits of them on each painting.

The representative of Kara Maria’s art is the Catharine Clark Gallery.

Achievements

• Kara Maria is an accomplished artist whose work is praised both by the art community and the audience.
  
  Many Maria’s paintings are acquired by different permanent collections of California, like the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Crocker Art Museum, the de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University, and others.
  
  The artist has been the recipient of many prestigious grants, fellowships, and awards, including SF Weekly’s Masterminds Grant, Artadia grant, and Eisner Prize in Art.

Works

More photos

• painting

  • Earth-Shattering (monarch butterfly)

  • Heed the Mauve of Twilight (California tiger salamander)

  • Pangolin

  • Atlantic Bluefin Tuna

  • Chimpanzee

  • An Exercise of Freedom (whooping crane)

  • Moondance (Mexican gray wolf)

  • Blue-throated Macaw

  • Peregrine Falcon

  • Rat

  • Perfect California Day

  • Rejection #7 (John McCain)

  • Rejection #4 (Sarah Palin)

  • The Revelation of the Being of What Is

  • Boom

  • La Lumiere

  • Zigzag

  • Voluptuous Deconstruction

  • Fly

  • Not Fade Away (polar bear)

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "No one smashes art-historical silos like Kara Maria. Her gonzo-poetic abstract landscapes – pastiches of gestural abstraction, Pop Art, action-comic iconography and natural history rendered in retina-tingling colors – are meticulously crafted exercises in well-ordered chaos." - David M. Roth, editor and publisher
  
  "If scientists could record a visual representation of human emotions, it seems plausible that they would look like Kara Maria's paintings. The San Francisco artist's nonrepresentational geometric shapes are exuberantly hued, well-defined and sharp-edged, and they are interrupted by euphoric swirls or by vague, cloudy patches and an occasional flash of a representational item, like a dog or a fly. They're layered, complicated and electric – just like the workings of the mind. Until scientists figure out how to live stream what human emotions look like and project them on a wall, Maria's work may be the closest thing we've got." - Sacramento News & Review

References

• Kara Maria's Official Website