Karen Gunderson, '66, BSE - Art Education
Karen Gunderson comes from a modest working class family in Racine Wisconsin. In the early 1960's she was working toward a Bachelor of Science in education with an interest in art, and was taking a couple of drawing and design classes for her degree. "Tom Parker saw my drawings, and said I should be an Art Major. So I called my mother and asked if I could major in art, and she said only if I got a degree in teaching so I wouldn't starve!"
Thus began an important career creating art, which would lead her to become an internationally known and highly regarded artist as well as teaching the discipline to others.
After receiving her Bachelor's degree from UW-W in 1966, Ms. Gunderson went on to get two Masters degree from the University of Iowa. A Masters of Art in Painting, with Stuart Edie and the other a Masters of Fine Arts in Intermedia. With Hans Breder. "They started a new major while I was there, a degree which included installation, multi-media and interdisciplinary art," she says, "It was the first in the nation and I was the first to receive it." Ms. Gunderson taught at Cornell College, Ohio State, NYU, the Tisch School of the Arts, SUNY-Purchase and the College of Mt. St. Vincent. She then took off time to raise her son, but when he went off to college she started teaching again at MICA in Baltimore for a couple of years. Now she makes visits as an artist-in-residence for the Post Bac Program at MICA from time to time. "The most engaging aspect to teaching is watching people discovering their own perceptions”, says Ms. Gunderson "it is like their world has opened up and it has dawned on them what they can accomplish. I like the feeling of having facilitated that experience for them."
Professionally, she has had many one person exhibitions in New York City. Some of the places were the Gloria Cortella Gallery, the Fischbach Gallery, the Donahue/Sosinsky Gallery, and this past spring she had an exhibition at the ClampART Gallery in Chelsea. The show was listed as one of the best five shows in New York City by the Village Voice. There were many reviews including the New York Times for these various exhibitions. She also had one person shows with the Michael H. Lord Gallery in Milwaukee. This past summer she was in two group shows on 57th Street in New York City; Luxe Gallery and Jason McCoy Gallery. Also this past summer, she was the “featured artist” for the gallery Frost & Reed, a London based gallery, at Scope Hampton.
An exhibition of her works about moral courage during World War II has toured seven different venues: HUC, NYC; CUNY, Staten Island; Holocaust Museum, Houston, TX; Skirball Museum, Cincinnati,OH; Brattleboro Museum, VT, Cornell College,Mt. Vernon, IA and Sophia, Bulgaria.
In 2000, Karen participated in the Art in Embassies Program by lending a number of her pieces to the American Embassy in Togo, West Africa. Then in 2002, she was one of only five American artists to go to various countries as a pilot program to give workshops. This was as an Artist in Residence in Lome, Togo, West Africa on behalf of the State Department Arts in Embassies Program. While there she gave workshops to thirteen young Togolese artists. It was a very memorable experience for her to meet Ambassador Karl Hofmann, PAO, Jeff Robertson and Jean Togbe. Ms. Gunderson was interviewed on Africa/Tropica with PAO, Jeffrey Robertson by Guy Yovo Doh and then interviewed by Channel 4, Lome, Togo at Ambassador Hofmann’s Residency at a party in honor of her artist in residency position. It was a great experience to be representing the United States.
In 2001 Ms. Gunderson won the Lorenzo Magnifico award for Second Prize in Painting at the Biennale Internazionale dell' Arte Contemporenea in Florence, Italy. She was invited to participate in the Biennale by the distinguished art scholar Barbara Rose, and the event included over six hundred artists from more than fifty different countries. The two pieces Ms. Gunderson exhibited at the Biennale were portraits of Cosimo De Medici and Contessina De Bardei De Medici. These works were from her series of black paintings, a group of unique works she has been working on for the past nineteen years.
In a catalogue essay of Ms. Gunderson's work, critic Donald Kuspit says, "Instead of orchestrating blackness as one color among many, the way Matisse did, Gunderson orchestrates blackness itself. Indeed, her paintings are miracles of musical blackness-monochrome played with Paginini-like virtuosity." Donald Kuspit included Ms. Gunderson in his book “The End of Art” as one of the “New Old Masters”. Then Mr. Kuspit included her paintings in a show he curated at the Abbott’s Palace in Gdensk, Poland 11/20/06-3/1-07. The show was entitled “New Old Masters”.
When asked about her experiences at the University of Wisconsin,Whitewater, Ms. Gunderson says that what strikes her the most is "We had great teachers who were excited about teaching us. Around 20 of us graduated that year, and 11 of us went on to graduate school with assistantships. When I started, we were in Old Main, and had great painting studios upstairs and wonderful, messy, ceramic studios in the basement. By the time I left the University had gone from being a state college to a University, and we had just about quadrupled in size!" Ms. Gunderson credits Tom Parker, Clayton Bailey, Francis Quaelo, Max Taylor and John Stevenson with teaching her the discipline that has helped bring her success. "If you weren't there twelve hours a day, the instructors didn't even want to talk to you," she says, "I couldn't have done what I did without their expectations of me."
She has a website: www.karengunderson.com “The essays are very interesting…especially Mark Daniel Cohen’s “The Heart of Light”.”