Kara Maria

Kara Maria, The Sea, The Sky, The You and I, (blue whale), acrylic on canvas, 26" x 26", 2021.

Kara Maria (born 1968), née Kara Maria Sloat, is a San Francisco-based visual artist known for paintings, works on paper and printmaking. Her vivid, multi-layered paintings have been described as collages or mash-ups of contemporary art vocabularies, fusing a wide range of abstract mark-making with Pop art strategies of realism, comic-book forms, and appropriation. Her work outwardly conveys a sense of playfulness and humor that gives way to explicit or subtle examinations—sometimes described as "cheerfully apocalyptic" —of issues including ecological collapse, diminishing biodiversity, military violence and the sexual exploitation of women. In a 2021 review, Squarecylinder critic Jaimie Baron wrote, "Maria’s paintings must be read as satires [that] recognize the absurdities of our era … These pretty, playful paintings are indictments, epitaphs-to-be."

Maria has exhibited at venues including the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, de Saisset Museum, Nevada Museum of Art, and Sonoma Valley Museum of Art. Her work belongs to the public art collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and San Jose Museum of Art, among others. She is married to artist Enrique Chagoya. She moved to San Francisco in 1990 to attend the University of California, Berkeley, earning a BA in 1993, followed by an MFA in 1998, both in art practice. Following initial solo shows at Patricia Sweetow (San Francisco, 1998) and Cité internationale des arts (Paris, 1999), she began exhibiting at Catharine Clark Gallery (San Francisco), where she had five solo shows between 2001 and 2018. and the de Saisset Museum (2022), as well as two surveys, "Head Over Heels" (2016, California State University, Chico) and "Rhapsody" (2022, Museo Italo Americano).

In addition to her artmaking, Maria has taught at California College of the Arts, University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco State University. However, writers suggest that unlike postmodern artists, Maria does not use a pastiche of styles ironically or self-referentially, but rather employs them like distinct notes in music—formal tools that are temporally co-existent and equally relevant. Curator Kelly Lindner described Maria's work as a "cacophony of symbols, motifs and painterly gestures" tethered to socio-political concerns by interjections of detailed, realistic imagery. She noted, "Maria's pluralistic approach to abstraction offers a counterpoint to time specificity … a painting style no longer necessarily represents a particular time period."

In subsequent work, presented in the solo exhibitions "Paradise Lost" (2007) and "Dystopia" (2008), she shifted to detailed, realistic renderings of emotionally charged figures and objects that often dominated backdrops featuring assorted abstract and Pop art gestures. The paintings mixed playfulness with a more somber awareness of neglect, displacement and peril—expressed by seemingly unaware creatures directly gazing out from the canvas—that spoke to the interconnection of humans, animals and habitats through consumption and waste.

In her exhibitions "Post-Nature" (2018), "Regarding Extinction" (2021) and "Precious and Precarious" (2022), these paintings evolved into miniature, Audubon-like depictions of lone endangered-species animals from around the world, in part inspired by Elizabeth Kolbert’s book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014), which detailed a contemporary, projected species loss unequaled since the dinosaur extinction. Crocker Art Museum, de Saisset Museum, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museo Italo Americano, Nevada Museum of Art, and San Jose Museum of Art, and has been commissioned to create public artworks for San Francisco General Hospital and the San Francisco Arts Commission.