KAREN HAMPTON

STATEMENT

As an artist of color, I have made a life long commitment to creating artwork that responds to the lives of my ancestors. My lens is anthropology and I study my own genealogy. I travel in my ancestors footsteps, I walk the roads where they lived, explored the plantations where they were enslaved, I am the storyteller. As their medium I provide a vehicle for my ancestors spirits to transcend history and remain as historical memory. My medium is cloth — whether digitally printed, hand woven or aged linens — pieces are imbued with the hopes and visions of African American lives, telling stories from a maternal perspective.