Karen Hampton

A mixed-media textile artist whose work is steeped in oral tradition and conceptual narrative, Karen Hampton is a storyteller at heart. Hampton views herself as a vehicle for ancestral voices to transcend time and place. Hampton's work acts as visual landscape, holding the collective memory of the forgotten "other" in American society. The canvas of her work is a coarsely woven cloth that is aged, permeated with text and images, and imbued with the hopes and visions of African Americans expressed from a maternal perspective. Hampton has shown her work in exhibitions since 1993, including Material Matters at the Museum of Folk and Craft in San Francisco and Looming Large: Contemporary Weavers of the Vanguard at the Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek. Most recently she received the prestigious Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation.