Karen Karnes
Birth Date: November 17, 1925
Death Date: July 12, 2016
Artist Gallery
Karen Karnes did not study ceramics at one of the more usual venues but came to clay in the context of design at the New Jersey College of Industrial Art in Newark. She arrived in 1948, at 23 years old, and ended up in the ceramic department where she fell in love both ceramics and with the ceramics instructor, David Weinrib, whom she later married and had one son, Abel. When Weinrib left the College to work for a pottery company in Stroudsburg, Pa, Karnes followed him, designing lamp bases for the factory. In 1949, after a short stay they moved to Italy and for eighteen months worked Sesto Fiorentino, a small pottery town near Florence. Karnes set up a pot shop at home, started to throw and continued to work with molded forms. The owner of a local factory was so charmed by her work that he agreed to fire her pots without charge. Karnes returned to American and in 1952 became a graduate fellow at Alfred University. She was just getting settled when an offer arrived for her and Weinrib to come for the summer to Black Mountain College. Black Mountain was then the most avant-garde arts school in the country. In 1959 the couple divorced leaving Karnes alone to raise her son. She raised a family, built two homes and lived solely by the income of her pottery. Karnes best described her work when she said: “My changes in form often occur through a process that might be described as kinesthetic; that is, through body feelings rather than through the mind. I sit on my wheel and twitch and try to feel how I would want to enclose this space or change that space from one form to another. Unconscious or conscious, such decisions for me are surely the outcome of 35 years of concentrated work in clay. In my studio I am quiet, concentrated, centered and in peace. I have always called myself a potter. My full attention has always been given to every piece I have made. I would hope that even the smallest, least expensive piece has my spirit as much as a large, more expensive one. They are made by developing an abstract idea and moving into ever-newer forms.”