Karyn Olivier

Karyn Olivier

Side profile image of Karyn Oliver, participating artist in special exhibition, "Emanation 2019"Karyn Olivier (b. Trinidad and Tobago) received her M.F.A. at Cranbrook Academy of Art and her B.A at Dartmouth College. She has exhibited at the Gwangju and Busan Biennials, World Festival of Black Arts and Culture (Dakar, Senegal), The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Whitney Museum of Art, MoMA P.S.1, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Contemporary Art Museum Houston, The Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh), SculptureCenter (NY), Drexel University, the University of the Arts, Ulrich Museum of Art and University of Delaware Museum, among others. In 2017, Olivier installed a large-scale commissioned work for Philadelphia’s Mural Arts program in historic Vernon Park. In 2015, Olivier created public works for Creative Time in Central Park and NYC’s Percent for Art program. She has received the 2018-19 Rome Prize and has been the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, the New York Foundation for the Arts Award, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, the William H. Johnson Prize, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award, a Creative Capital Foundation grant and a Harpo Foundation grant. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Time Out New York, The Village Voice, Art in America, Flash Art, Mousse, The Washington Post, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Frieze, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Hyperallergic, among others. Olivier is currently an associate professor and program head of sculpture at Tyler School of Art.

~Julie Courtney, Curator

Back to Emanation 2019

Peek Into Olivier’s Emanation Process:

  • A large, rusted Fairbanks scale sits in front of a large hill of oyster shells.
  • A large heap of oyster shells sitting in the back of a truck with a marshy landscape in the background.
  • Door in Museum leading to a behind-the-scenes workspace. It will be divided in four and molds will be created for each panel.
  • Closeup of hands working carefully to form rectangular boxes out of chicken wire.
  • Glass Studio Artist, Jarryd creates a wire infrastructure, prepping for a mold of one of four door panels from the Museum
  • Glass Studio Artist pours a plaster mixture into the cottle board structure to create a mold of the door panel.
  • "Emanation 2019" Artist Karyn Olivier and WheatonArts Glass Artist measure a display case in the Museum of American Glass.
  • Glass Studio Artists inspect the completed plaster mold
  • A metal ladle is used to pour molten glass from our furnace into a pre-heated plaster mold of a door panel.
  • Closeup of a metal ladle pouring molten glass into a plaster mold of a rectangular door panel.