Kara Maria (born 1968), née Kara Maria Sloat, is a San Francisco-based visual artist known for paintings, works on paper and printmaking.Roth, David M. "The Nature Conundrum," SquareCylinder, June 2, 2021. Retrieved June 6, 2023.University of California, Berkeley. Kara Sloat (AKA Kara Maria), Art Practice Faculty. Retrieved June 5, 2023. Her vivid, multi-layered paintings have been described as collages or mash-ups of contemporary art vocabularies, fusing a wide range of abstract mark-making with Pop art strategies of realism, comic-book forms, and appropriation.Desmarais, Charles. "Impact of Jim Hodges, Kara Maria gallery shows impossible to reproduce," San Francisco Chronicle, March 1, 2018.Retrieved June 5, 2023.Rodriguez, Juan. "Kara Maria at A.O.V.," Artweek, September 2000. Retrieved June 5, 2023.Lallas, Matthew. "Kara Maria’s Abstract World of Endangered Animals," The Santa Clara, February 4, 2022. Her work outwardly conveys a sense of playfulness and humor that gives way to explicit or subtle examinations—sometimes described as "cheerfully apocalyptic"Roth, David M. "Kara Maria @ Catharine Clark," SquareCylinder, September 24, 2015. Retrieved June 5, 2023.—of issues including ecological collapse, diminishing biodiversity, military violence and the sexual exploitation of women.Harmanci, Reyhan. "Packard Jennings and Kara Maria at Clark," San Francisco Chronicle, January 24, 2008. Retrieved June 5, 2023.Granberry, Michael. "As American as sex and war," Dallas Morning News, August 12, 2012.Recology. "Recology San Francisco Artist in Residence Exhibitions: Work by Kara Maria, Imin Yeh and Matthew Goldberg," News, December 16, 2016. Retrieved June 5, 2023.Lindner, Kelly. "The Meaningful Non Sequitur," in Kara Maria: Head Over Heels, Chico, CA: California State University, Chico, 2016. Retrieved June 5, 2023. In a 2021 review, Squarecylinder critic Jaimie Baron wrote, "Maria’s paintings must be read as satires [that] recognize the absurdities of our era … These pretty, playful paintings are indictments, epitaphs-to-be."Baron, Jaimie. "Jaimie Baron on Kara Maria," SquareCylinder, April 16, 2022. Retrieved June 5, 2023.
Maria has exhibited at venues including the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston,Colpitt, Frances. "Report from Houston: Learning from Comics," Art in America, October 2003. de Saisset Museum,Stetson, Grace. "Kara Maria at De Saisset Museum," Metro Silicon Valley, January 26, 2022. Retrieved June 5, 2023. Nevada Museum of Art,Nevada Museum of Art. "After Audubon: Art, Observation, and Natural Science," Exhibitions, 2018. Retrieved June 5, 2023. and Sonoma Valley Museum of Art.Sonoma Valley Museum of Art. "Double Trouble: Enrique Chagoya and Kara Maria," Exhibition, 2021. Retrieved June 5, 2023. Her work belongs to the public art collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and San Jose Museum of Art, among others.Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Birds of Paradise, Kara Maria, Artworks. Retrieved June 5, 2023.Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Voluptuous Deconstruction, Kara Maria, Collection. Retrieved June 5, 2023.San Jose Museum of Art. Kara Maria, Objects. Retrieved June 5, 2023. She is married to artist Enrique Chagoya.Cheng, DeWitt. "Creative in Common at the de Saisset Museum," Metroactive, October 1, 2014. Retrieved June 5, 2023.
Education and career Kara Maria Sloat was born in 1968 in Binghamton, New York.San Francisco Station. Kara Maria, Artists. Retrieved June 5, 2023. She moved to San Francisco in 1990 to attend the University of California, Berkeley, earning a BA in 1993, followed by an MFA in 1998, both in art practice.
After graduating, Maria began to exhibit her work, gaining wider recognition in the early 2000s with appearances in group shows at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Katonah Museum of Art, and Oakland Museum of California, among other venues.Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. "Splat Boom Pow! The Influence of Comics in Contemporary Art," Exhibitions. Retrieved June 5, 2023.Baker, Kenneth. "The Last Gasps Of Abstraction," San Francisco Chronicle, September 2, 2000. Retrieved June 6, 2023.Lindner, Kelly et al. Kara Maria: Head Over Heels, Chico, CA: California State University, Chico, 2016. Retrieved June 5, 2023. Following initial solo shows at Patricia Sweetow (San Francisco, 1998) and Cité internationale des arts (Paris, 1999), she began exhibiting at Catharine Clark Gallery (San Francisco), where she had five solo shows between 2001 and 2018. In her later career, she has had solo exhibitions at Recology (2015), Anglim/Trimble Gallery (2021), Sonoma Valley Museum of Art (2021)Lee, Jackie. "Upheaval and Irreverence—Double Trouble at the SVMA," Sonoma Valley Sun, October 14, 2021. Retrieved June 5, 2023. and the de Saisset Museum (2022),de Saisset Museum. "Kara Maria - Precious and Precarious: Life on the Edge of Extinction," Exhibitions. Retrieved June 5, 2023. as well as two surveys, "Head Over Heels" (2016, California State University, Chico) and "Rhapsody" (2022, Museo Italo Americano).Faraudo, Jeff. "Kara Maria art speaks more than color, style," Chico Enterprise-Record, March 5, 2016. Retrieved June 6, 2023.Museo Italo Americano. Kara Maria. Retrieved June 5, 2023.
In addition to her artmaking, Maria has taught at California College of the Arts, University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco State University.California College of the Art. Kara Maria, People. Retrieved June 5, 2023.
Work and reception Maria's art draws on diverse art historical influences—various modes of abstraction, Pop art, Japanese woodblock prints—as well as the formative 1970s pop culture of her youth, including comic books and artistic toys such as Lite-Brite, Spirograph and Colorforms. Her work arose in the aftermath of the 1980s and 1990s postmodern ethos of mixing styles—in her case, those of artists Jackson Pollock, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Philip Guston, Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke have been cited.Jeno, Heather. "Paradise Lost by Kara Maria," Santa Barbara Independent, July 5, 2007. Retrieved June 5, 2023. However, writers suggest that unlike postmodern artists, Maria does not use a pastiche of styles ironically or self-referentially, but rather employs them like distinct notes in music—formal tools that are temporally co-existent and equally relevant.LeDuc, Aimee. "Unsolvable Puzzles," in Kara Maria: Head Over Heels, Chico, CA: California State University, Chico, 2016. Retrieved June 5, 2023. Curator Kelly Lindner described Maria's work as a "cacophony of symbols, motifs and painterly gestures" tethered to socio-political concerns by interjections of detailed, realistic imagery. She noted, "Maria's pluralistic approach to abstraction offers a counterpoint to time specificity … a painting style no longer necessarily represents a particular time period."
Work (1998–2013) Maria's early, largely abstract works were described by San Francisco Chronicle critic Kenneth Baker as "post-Pop Art" with color field painting titles (e.g., Pink/Green, 1998) that "packed comic-strip explosions and speed lines into otherwise elegant color patterns." With paintings such as Boom and Un Jeu (both 1999), she began moving toward more raucous palettes, graphic, cartoon-like representations, and cultural and social commentary. For example, the pink, orange and purple Boom juxtaposed the title exclamation, bursts and smoke trails with stars inscribed with white line drawings of women's hands and genitals and a phallic lavender missile; Un Jeu was a multilayered work incorporating a television interruption pattern, looping arabesques, silhouettes of rabbits and pistols, and black dots suggesting either droppings or ammunition pellets. In a different series, Maria—then a vegetarian—depicted cuts of meat based on grocery store flyer imagery, including a deck of nudie cards in which she replaced women's torsos with slabs of meat.Bing, Alison. "The Bigger Picture: Painting and Politics," Kitchen Sink, Summer 2003.Juxtapoz. "Kara Maria: Dystopia," July 12, 2012. Retrieved June 5, 2023.
In subsequent work, presented in the solo exhibitions "Paradise Lost" (2007) and "Dystopia" (2008), she shifted to detailed, realistic renderings of emotionally charged figures and objects that often dominated backdrops featuring assorted abstract and Pop art gestures. These paintings uncomfortably merged war iconography (soldiers, fighter jets, camouflage patterns and references to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal), the palpable flesh of pornography, and consumer culture imagery (e.g., Gas Pump, 2007) to visceral effect. The painting Hot and Bothered (2007) juxtaposed a decorative mandala alongside pink, purple and white Richter-like squeegee pulls of paint, from under which soldiers bearing weapons and provocatively posed nude women peeked out, creating a candy-coated, even playing field conflating military violence with the sexual exploitation of women. In a review of the "Dystopia" show, the San Francisco Chronicle'''s Reyhan Harmanci wrote, "The energy in her paintings is intense: Maria has pushed the meeting of naked women and instruments of war past comfort, and the images can shock." In her exhibitions "Inviting the Storm" (2009) and "Artwarpornica" (2012), Maria expanded upon these themes, introducing concern for the state of the environment into the work.Sacramento News & Review. "Chaos on canvas," June 11, 2009. Retrieved June 6, 2023.
Environmental and endangered species-related work
In 2014, Maria was an artist-in-residence at Recology—the City of San Francisco dump—where she was challenged to create a body of work using only discarded materials. Scavenging canvases and mass-produced artworks and overpainting them with recycled acrylic paint, she discovered a new theme. She embedded carefully rendered portraits of animals that inhabited or passed through the site (e.g., seagulls, raccoons, hawks) into brightly colored compositions of disjointed, swirling abstract forms that conveyed the constantly churning, tumultuous quality of the facility.Cramer, Laura Jaye. “Kings and queens of the heap," SF Weekly, January 23, 2015. The paintings mixed playfulness with a more somber awareness of neglect, displacement and peril—expressed by seemingly unaware creatures directly gazing out from the canvas—that spoke to the interconnection of humans, animals and habitats through consumption and waste. She extended these works to include a wider range of animals (e.g., primates, rhinos, bats and leopards) and painterly gesture (starburst explosions, spiraling vapor trails, hard-edged quasi-cubist spaces, paint smears and Lichtenstein-like dots and stripes) in the exhibition "Haywire" (2015), which was likened in a review to a pop surrealist requiem over "dystopian resignation."Sacramento News & Review. "Emotional electricity," February 12, 2015. Retrieved June 6, 2023.