“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 a painter and printmaker whose work concerns itself with the things most people are too hurried to notice: migration, memory, inheritance, and the quiet persistence of beauty. Educated at Boston University and among the first in her family to attend college, Campbell constructs richly layered worlds where figures drift through patterned landscapes and fragments of nature appear less observed than remembered. Her paintings possess the peculiar elegance of something uncovered, rather than invented – surfaces built slowly through translucent color, etched marks, and symbolic forms that hover somewhere between dream and document.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including participation in the 15th Havana Biennial and cultural exchanges with printmakers at the Taller Experimental de Grafika de La Habana in Cuba. In Ohio, Albanese Campbell has become a significant voice in contemporary printmaking through both her studio practice and her role as president of Phoenix Rising Printmaking Cooperative, where she teaches and advocates for the enduring art of the handmade print. Her work resides in the permanent collection of the Columbus Museum of Art and the Columbus Metropolitan Library. She has received numerous honors, including multiple best in show awards and recognition from the Ohio arts council.
Nature appears throughout Campbell’s work, not as scenery, but as metaphor. In “Consider the [Trout] Lilies” she writes of discovering the flowers “almost camouflaged” among the leaves, “sparkling jewels scattered throughout our lawn.” The observation feels characteristic of her entire practice. Prints such as “A Long Journey” and “The Travelers” series of life-size paintings suggest that meaning rarely arrives fully declared; it lingers quietly in traces, patterns, and remembered places, waiting for someone patient enough to recognize it.
Her new body of work, “Postcards From My Ancestors,” is an imaginative excavation of hidden family stories, buried in earthquake rubble or the depths of the Mediterranean, to tell stories that may or may not be true. The artist is asking, “How can my art investigate personal life and history 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. 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.