Karen Hackenberg

Karen Hackenberg got her start as an artist after earning her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Through her work in architecture and ecological textile design, she fine-tuned her environmental values while developing an eye for the juxtapositions between the natural and artificial. Her paintings and sculptures explore issues of post-consumer pollution, deforestation, ocean degradation, and resource depletion.


"In my ongoing painting series, Watershed, I take a light-hearted yet subversive approach to the serious subject of ocean degradation, presenting a tongue-in-cheek taxonomy of our new post-consumer creatures of the sea. Influenced by the ideas of Pop artists Claes Oldenburg, Ed Ruscha and Andy Warhol, and the high-contrast light of Edward Hopper, I meticulously paint seascapes in oil and gouache, lovingly crafting beautiful images of conventionally ugly beach cast-offs, and aiming to create provocative visual juxtapositions of form and idea.”

-Karen Hackenberg

Karen Hackenberg