KARIN BROKER
Karin Broker has been a successful professional artist for decades. Her works include drawings, prints, and assemblage sculptures. Houston based, she was Professor of Printmaking and Drawing at Rice University, a position she held for 41 years. Her art can be found in numerous important permanent museum collections, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Bechtler Collection, and the Fogg Museum at Harvard University.
Whether she is wiring objects with rhinestone, hammering metal onto wood, welding steel into 2D drawings or making prints, her objects are conversations with melancholia regarding family, religion, gender inequality and violence towards women. They also chronicle acts of courage and brilliance achieved by her “tribe.”
No matter the material, Broker's art is heavily informed by what she calls “gender stuff.” Where her work first focused on gender negativity, she has become empowered by the thousands and thousands of incredibly talented and brave women who have been forgotten, purposely overlooked and dismissed for their many achievements throughout history.
Born in Pennsylvania, Karin Broker (b. 1950, Penn, Pennsylvania) received a BFA from the University of Iowa and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She studied printmaking under Stanley W. Hayter at the Atelier 17 in Paris. She was Professor of Printmaking and Drawing at Rice University from 1980–2021. In 1994, Broker was the Texas Artist of the Year and was awarded two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Houstonia magazine published a story about Broker's home and studio which can be viewed here.
