Steeped in craft traditions, yet working across disciplines, Karen Reimer (born 1958) produces work that expansively addresses the larger relationship of craft to modernist and postmodernist cultural aims.
For Reimer, craft is a means to explore architectural concerns, minimalist issues, questions of labor, and connotations within the domestic or vernacular. She has had solo exhibitions at moniquemeloche gallery, Chicago; the Rochester Art Center, MN; the Riverside Arts Center, IL; Schopf Gallery, Chicago; and the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago. Her work has been included in group shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Contemporary Craft Museum, Portland, Oregon; and Wallspace Gallery, New York, among others.
Reimer is the recipient of an Artadia Individual Artist grant and a Richard A. Driehaus Individual Artist award. Her work has been included in the publications By Hand: The Use of Craft in Contemporary Art (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010), The Object of Labor: Art, Cloth, and Cultural Production (MIT Press, 2007), and Contemporary Textiles (Black Dog Press). She is currently an instructor in Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Reimer completed a BA at Bethel College, North Newton, KS, and an MFA at the University of Chicago.