Lyric
ORGANIZED BY KAREN BAUER AND SARAH ROWE
NOVEMBER 11TH - DECEMBER 16TH, 2022
Lyric, organized by Sarah Rowe and Karen Bauer, is the visual soundtrack to a 20-year friendship between artists.
The A-side: Plays painting and printmaking grounded in mutual influence, fostered by shared histories and the depth of time. Working across disciplines and representational formats, Sarah and Karen have coded their communication over the last 20 years in mixtapes. From Sarah’s home in Nebraska to Karen’s home in the Netherlands, mixtapes linked the artists sonically over decades and an ocean. The individual works in the exhibition span the entire history of their friendship and trace the contours of family, distance, and time spent apart.
The B-sides: Stray from the staid traditions of painting and printmaking with improvisational site-specific collaborative collage and performance that gesture toward the joy and grief of separation. Showing together for the first time in the same space, Lyric takes each artist’s individual works and recontextualizes them in the gallery, layering, and configuring them at different tempos. In doing so, Sarah and Karen share space in the liner notes to articulate the ebb and flow of artistic practice, intrinsically linked to friendship, as a function of time.
Generator Grant programming is presented with support from the Nebraska Arts Council and the Nebraska Cultural Endowment.
Installation Images
About the Artists
Karen Bauer was born in St. Louis, Missouri. She received her Bachelors of Fine Art degree from The Kansas City Art Institute and her Masters of Painting from Stanford University. In 1993, she returned to St. Louis where she settled as an artist and teacher of fine arts. Inspired by the Great Masters, Vermeer and Rembrandt she came to the Netherlands in 2000, where she lived and worked for twenty years. Her artwork explores the interwoven workings of the mind and spirit. Each painting or drawing contributes to the pattern of which she calls her personal fabric, a detailed weaving that records her journey from the light to dark to light again
Sarah Rowe is an interdisciplinary artist based in Omaha, NE. Her work opens cross cultural dialogues by utilizing methods of painting, casting, fiber arts, performance, and Native American ceremony in unconventional ways. Rowe’s work is participatory, a call to action, and re-imagines traditional Native American symbology to fit the narrative of today’s global landscape. Rowe holds a BA in Studio Art from Webster University, studying in St. Louis, MO, and Vienna, Austria. She is of Lakota and Ponca descent.