Karen Snouffer received both her BS in Art Education and her MFA at The Ohio State University. Currently, she is a Professor Emerita at Kenyon College and has a studio and residence in Gambier, Ohio. Snouffer creates painting, collage, sculpture, and installation, exploring contradiction’s potential to expand tensions felt in visual and physical movement. Materiality is a powerful force as is the merging of unexpected, non-traditional media with more conventional materials and techniques. Snouffer has exhibited in Miami, New York, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Columbus, Minneapolis, and internationally in Epernay, France. She has been a resident fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA, and an Artist in Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA. She has received six Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist fellowships and a McGregor Foundation Global Exchange Grant to France. She is represented by Hammond Harkins Gallery, Columbus, Ohio. Her work is in the Girls Club Collection, Sun Life of Canada, The Greater Columbus Convention Center and numerous private collections.

“Cryptic Scaffolds” is visually symbolic of the structures that support and surround three- dimensional architectural and monumental forms. Here, the scaffolds’ silhouettes are unexpectedly visceral, as they intersect and blend into one another, creating powerful forms on their own. When living in Rome in the fall of 2018, the artist began to see these structures as mutually functional and beautiful.