Karen Schiff

Karen Schiff is an artist and wordsmith who also has a long-term research project of reinterpreting Pablo Picasso’s pivotal painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. A career of art exhibition and publication, on both sides of the Atlantic, has often involved the analysis of interior architectural spaces.

Education includes an MFA in Studio Art (Honors in Drawing) from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Tufts University, a PhD in Comparative Literature (with a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies) from the University of Pennsylvania, and a combined AB/AM degree from Brown University (AB in Comparative Literature / AM in English, including a semester in Madrid). Graduate coursework often focused on Architecture, and Schiff curated the exhibition “ARCHItextURE: Experiencing Books As Buildings” at the Philadelphia Art Alliance.

Prior to the GSD, Schiff was affiliated with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, including two years as a Core fellow in Critical Studies at the MFAH’s associated Glassell School of Art. Previous teaching includes Drawing courses at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Boston Architectural College, as well as Architecture reviews at the BAC, Pratt Institute (in a cohort of English faculty offering Architecture-oriented writing classes and poetry workshops), and Clemson University. Schiff’s work at the BAC included designing an individualized undergraduate thesis program for Design Studies, expanding the program’s research content, and winning a grant to author the thesis handbook that was used for the almost twenty years of the program’s existence.

Drawings are in the permanent collections of museums such as the Art Institute of Chicago, The Brooklyn Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, and the Colby College Museum of Art, and in the private collections of individuals and of institutions such as the MCS Collection of Contemporary Drawing in Funchal, Portugal (curated by Adriano Pedrosa). Criticism has been published in periodicals such as Art Journal, Hyperallergic Weekend, Art in Print, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, and Boston’s Big, Red, & Shiny (on the interior spatial dynamics of several New York art fairs).

At the GSD, Schiff served as a freelance writer and editor from 2019 until 2024, starting with articles for the online newsletter about specific exhibitions and courses. One of those articles became an essay, “Inevitable Ecology: Antonio Rovaldi’s Metroclimate,” in a contest held by Switch / On Paper (a Paris-based journal) for members of the International Art Critics Association (AICA).