“In direct response to the myriad sources that diminish us, I celebrate the mystery that makes life so beautiful and confounding. Within my art, complexity is a call to action, an invitation to come together to face the challenges before us.”

Karen Fitzgerald is a contemporary American artist who makes art out of things from our everyday lives. Through the context of these materials, she explores inherent values and meanings, fascinated by our collective beliefs and their reflections in the world around us.

In practice, this involves breaking down anything from books to discarded clothing, seeking out color and shape, and building structural collages. Preserved with resin, her work takes on a jewel-like, reflective finish, provoking a closer look at what lies below the surface.

Fitzgerald works primarily in series focused on subjects and materials she finds particularly relevant. Her affinity for language brought about MEDITATIONS IN AN EMERGENCY in 2023, a series titled after and referencing important books of poetry, in which she explored the complexities of our connections to one another through her work with discarded clothing and textiles.

In 2022, she completed MIRRORS, a series of pieces made out of Essence Magazine and roses on beveled mirrors, as a call to address bias and willful blindness in herself and others.

From 2019 through 2021, she constructed MARGINALIA from encyclopedias, which examines the changes in how we think about and share information and asks wall-sized questions about where we’re headed and what we want to create.