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karen hampton

Karen Hampton’s textile work explores her own genealogy using new and traditional techniques and materials. She describes herself as a griot—”a keeper and transmitter of the genealogies of a people." She graduated from the New College of California, in San Francisco in 1992 and currently works and lives in Los Angeles. Karen has had worked exhibited across the United States starting in 1994 and continuing to the present.

Her arist statement is as follows: "As an artist of color, I have made a life long commitment to creating artwork that responds to the lives of my ancestors. My lens is anthropology and I study my own genealogy.

"I travel in my ancestors footsteps, I walk the roads where they lived, explored the plantations where they were enslaved, I am the storyteller.

"As their medium I provide a vehicle for my ancestor’s spirits to transcend history and remain as historical memory. My medium is cloth—whether digitally printed, hand woven or aged linens—pieces are imbued with the hopes and visions of African American lives, telling their stories from a maternal perspective.”

View more of Karen Hampton's work on her website.