“A Long Journey”
Thirty 15.25”x15.25” pressure prints, with relief and oil pastel.
Assembled measurement is 91.5”x76.25”
Each vertical panel hangs from a bamboo support as a separate unit.
Created to be exhibited at the 15th Bienal de La Habana (2024) Havana, Cuba. The overall theme is “Shared Horizons.” The theme for the Columbus, Ohio artists exhibiting at the Bienal is “On the Street Where I Live.”
“A Long Journey” is inspired by the path most American families have traveled over generations to arrive at our current home. We are a nation of immigrants. This multi-panel print is building a bridge to tell a personal family origin story. My own family originated in Southern Italy and Sicily, but the story of how my ancestors arrived in Italy is lost. Art enables time-traveling to imaginatively fill in the blanks. This work is an artistic expression of unseen layers of time, traces of history, pathways across generations, and the deeply personal search for home.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Karen Albanese Campbell is an award-winning painter and printmaker creating narrative art that is personal and expressionistic. Described as “rich and diverse,” her art is marked by the symbolic relationships she creates between time-traveling human figures and abstracted landscapes. Thoroughly researching her ideas that are rooted in current events, especially the crisis of displaced people around the world, the artist layers them with her experiences, personal imagery and memory through imagination. Her imagery and style can be firmly representational, is often highly patterned and freely takes on abstract qualities. This allows her to create fluid transitional spaces to express her ideas about empathy and the search for belonging.
Albanese Campbell creates work that encourages viewers to ask questions, which is an extension of how she approaches the world and her work. Some questions she is asking as she works are: “When oral history is the only source of information about a specific person or event in our past, how do we engage our imagination as a partner in our storytelling? How do we create art that is based on reality but is fused with illusion, transformation and revelation? How can my art ‘put meat on the bones’ of the fragments and scraps we carry in order to reach a truth that is more essential than facts, especially when access to facts is lost to distance, time and decay?”
While an art student at Boston University she discovered Japanese art and made weekly visits to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts renown Asian Art collection and she is heavily influenced by Asian art to this day. She studied with a "Who's Who" of Boston Expressionist artists, one of whom was an original member of the Bay Area Figurative group of painters, James Weeks.
Her woodcut “Moment of Silence” was her first piece of art that was directly inspired by faces and figures drawn from news photos of refugees and migrants. This work of art can be found in the collection of the Columbus Museum of Art. She has continued exploring these themes through the "Travelers" series of paintings (which was shown at ArtPrize in 2021), and the "Caravan" series of carborundum prints. Karen has won awards for her prints and her art quilts.
Born in Syracuse, NY to an Italian-American family, her own family history is crazed with differences of opinion, conflicting narratives and an appalling lack of information. Albanese Campbell, who never met her grandparents, lives in Columbus, Ohio.