KAREN SHAW (estate)

JUNE 13 - JULY 12, 2026

Karen Shaw (1941-2025), was a conceptual artist whose intelligent and humorous work dealt with issues of language, translation, gender, and the environment. Born in The Bronx, she attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan and graduated from Hunter College with a BFA. She exhibited her work for more than 60 years, including solo and group exhibitions in New York, Paris, Munich, Basel, and Guatemala City, as well as across the United States. In the mid-1970s, her work was included in important exhibitions at NYC venues such as Franklin Furnace, P.S.1, and OK Harris. Shaw was awarded an NEA artist fellowship, an individual artist’s grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and she received residency grants from the Karolyi Foundation in the South of France. Her work is included in museum collections including the Herbert Johnson Museum at Cornell University, Ithaca NY; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, the Vera List Gallery of the New School, New York, NY; and the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, OR. Shaw was also the senior curator at the Islip Art Museum and Carriage House, East Islip, NY for almost 40 years. For the past two decades she divided her time between New York’s Chelsea neighborhood and a house upstate in Holmes, NY.