Today we’d like to introduce you to Karey Kessler.

Hi Karey, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
Over the last twenty-plus years since then, I’ve moved from Philadelphia, PA, to Washington, DC, to Winston-Salem, NC, to Seattle, WA, and spent a year living in Kaohsiung Taiwan in 2014. I have been a gallery manager, a librarian assistant at two different art museums, a Montessori teacher, and became a mother to two boys. Through it all, I never stopped creating art.

Creating art was never a hobby for me even when I wasn’t making art “full time”. The act of painting and drawing is how I process my thoughts and stay grounded and true to myself. It is a necessary part of my health and sanity and no number of rejections, gatekeepers or time constraints will ever stop me from making art.

Luckily, I am at a time in my life when I can create art full time. I am a proud member of a cooperative gallery in Seattle. And grateful to have artwork in the flat files of Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn, NY and images in the online registry of White Columns Gallery (NYC). I have had the opportunity to exhibit my work widely, including at the Weatherspoon Art Museum (NC), the Katona Art Museum (NY), and the Bellevue Art Museum Education Gallery (WA). My work has also been included in several publications including The Map as Art (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), by Kitty Harmon; From Here to There: A Curious Collection From the Hand Drawn Map Association (Princeton Architectural Press); The Embodied Forest (ecoartspace, 2021); Orion Magazine (2021); and Dovetail Magazine (2023). I’ve created several public art installations, and in 2022 I was presented with a huge challenge when Meta Open Arts commissioned me to create a mural at Meta Reality Labs in Redmond Washington.

This fall I was honored to partake in a month long artist residency at Willapa Bay Air. I als0 had my first solo museum show at The San Juan Islands Museum of Art.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I have always thought of myself as an artist, but I didn’t always know that I would pursue art as a career. I went to the University of Pennsylvania to study Cultural Anthropology, thinking I would one day work in public health. But I couldn’t stay out of the art studios, and I kept taking art classes until I wound up having a double major in Anthropology and Fine Arts. After graduation, I was still figuring out which path I wanted to follow. I taught painting at Phillips Andover that summer (using my Fine Arts degree) and then later spent time as a park ranger at Tonto National Monument in AZ (using my Anthropology degree). After a lot of soul searching, I decided to follow my passion and I went to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and graduated with an MFA in 2001.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I am a painter, and, for me, painting is an act of meditation and contemplation.

My work conveys the unmappable, intangible essence existing beneath the more familiar structures of the visible world using cartographic imagery. Through overlaid map imagery and evocative text, I create poetic landscapes that invite multiple interpretations. Like a cartographer, I label areas — not with real locations, but where the marks and colors evoke feelings, thoughts, and memories. This process of combining cartography with abstract marks and colors charts new territory.

When I’m making the repeated dots and lines of my map-paintings, I focus on the interconnected ecosystems of the world that don’t end where one country’s borders end and another’s begins; deep time (before humans were on earth) and the eternal things that will remain once we’re gone; the vastness of the universe; and the fleetingness of each moment.

We live in a world that is mapped all the way from outer space right down to our front doors. But, as an artist working with traditional materials such as watercolor, ink, stencils, stamps, and freehand writing— I am able to depict more than what can be seen. My maps question our sense of knowing exactly where we are and challenge conventional notions of space and time. They map the spaces between: between place and thought, between space and time, between the external world around me and internal worlds within.

For many, it currently feels like we’re wandering around in the dark without a map. I hope that, perhaps, my maps — which explore both the fact that we don’t truly know where we and explore feelings of uncertainty and ecological grief for the environmental changes happening around us — can act as a prayer for guidance for both our planet and for ourselves.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://kareykessler.com/home.html
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kareykessler/
• Facebook: Karey Kessler Studio
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karey-kessler-7361595/
• Youtube: https://youtu.be/NlBTJVzbyt8?si=rQEbNmUFT3FzjqNA

Image Credits
Ryan Warner Artist Eye, Bret Corrington