In her studio practices, Karen Snouffer concentrates on mixed media objects, collages and installation, exploring the tensions felt in visual and physical movement and how contradiction has the power to expand that tension and beauty. Her work is often inspired by: past and present experiences with varied forms of dance; female identity; connections with nature and its forces; and the intersections of two-dimensional and three-dimensional space. Materiality is a powerful force in her work as well, as she believes in the merging of unexpected, non-traditional media with that of more conventional techniques. Having worked recently with a mathematician in an interdisciplinary, collaborative studio art class, she discovered chaos theory and how randomness and structure can play a role in nature, in society, in works of art and the art making process.
Snouffer has exhibited nationally at venues such as: Art Center South Florida, Miami; The Work Space, New York; Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art; Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnati; Hammond Harkins Gallery, Columbus, OH; The Ohio State University Center for the Humanities; Poor Dog Space, Los Angeles; Soo Visual Arts Center, Minneapolis; and internationally at La Médiathèque, Epernay, France. She is a former residency fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA, and a past Artist in Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA; a recipient of five Ohio Arts Council individual artist fellowships; a GLCA New Directions Initiative; and a McGregor Foundation Global Exchange Grant to France. She is represented by Hammond Harkins Gallery in Columbus, Ohio.
In the fall of 2016, Snouffer traveled to Rome, Italy, for four months as a Kenyon College Professor of Art. In addition to teaching there, she started a new direction in her work, which emerged from the intensely rich urban environment and exposure to a vast amount of Italian Renaissance and Baroque art. In 2017, for the aforementioned collaborative entitled class, "Math in the Studio," students explored with faculty the connections and intersections shared by the fields of math and art. She and her math colleague have been invited to present a paper on this class in July 2018, in Stockholm at the Bridges conference.
Snouffer has also collaborated with poets, dancers, sculptors and new media artists. Her work has been published in three books: The Next Hedgerow; Love Life; Love Life: Memory and Nature at Play; and Somatic Principles and Dance.
Karen Snouffer received both her BS in Educataion and her MFA at The Ohio State University.
As a Professor Emerita at Kenyon College, she teaches one class yearly in painting, drawing, or mixed media. She has a studio and residence in Gambier, Ohio
