Open Studio is pleased to present All Done by Karen May, a solo exhibition by multidisciplinary artist Karen May (b. 1950), in collaboration with NIAD Art Center. Bringing together works across fiber, collage, works on paper, and artist-made books, the exhibition presents a focused view of May’s expansive practice and marks her first solo presentation in New York.

May refers to her work as a “memory tool,” using image and text to register people, places, and moments. Her compositions develop through accumulation and response, with recurring motifs—triangles, grids, and hand-drawn symbols—forming a highly personal visual system. These shapes can suggest initials, family members, cat ears, or shifting symbolic meanings, evolving across works as part of an internal logic. Central to May’s practice is her collaboration with entities she refers to as Kitty and Lynn, sisters who take the shape of cats. They help May direct the work in a dialogue, guiding the placement of words, shapes, and forms. This call-and-response structure informs the development of each composition, resulting in a process that is both intuitive and deliberate.

May’s visual language is closely tied to her daily life, where observations—such as shifts from day to night, the rhythm of travel between home and studio, or familiar domestic surroundings—are translated into pattern, color, and form. These references, often abstracted, produce a coded system that carries through her work. Her detournements—works made from found Artforum advertisements—extend this approach, as May reworks existing images through drawing and text, transforming commercial material into compositions that are at once referential to pop culture and autonomous interventions. Across mediums, her practice resists fixed interpretation, instead presenting a self-contained logic shaped through repetition, variation, and internal dialogue.

Karen May has worked at NIAD Art Center in Richmond, California since 2011. Her work has been widely exhibited in the Bay Area, including at the Oakland Museum of California, Minnesota Street Project, Kala Art Institute, and Personal Space Gallery. In 2024, her two-part exhibition Karen May: ArtForum Interventions was presented at the Arts Center at Duck Creek in East Hampton, New York. In 2023, a group of her mixed-media works was acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

NIAD Art Center (Nurturing Independence Through Artistic Development), based in Richmond, California, is a progressive art studio dedicated to supporting artists with developmental disabilities. Since its founding in 1982, NIAD has provided a space for artists to develop their practices and gain recognition within the contemporary art field.

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