When Karen Andrews died on the last day of 2022, her 80-word obituary was a pithy plainspoken account of the award-winning Utah painter’s life. The bulk of it read:
She had a magnetic personality & was honest & kind to a fault! She loved God, painting, making jewelry, candles, pottery, the artist Mark Rothko, the color blue, music esp. jazz, & cats. She leaves behind her husband Ronnie, siblings & felines. Preceded in death by parents & BBF Joyce. She lived her life her way & requested no public service. She prayed God would remember where she lay.
Near the end of her life in at-home hospice care with her husband by her side, Andrews met Allison Harbertson, who was the painter’s hospice chaplain. It was a singular encounter. The couple previously had not sought out such support but the decision to accept Harbertson’s invitation proved serendipitous. For many people, even mentioning the word ‘hospice’ is taboo, often more uncomfortable than the act of grieving occurring in any public way. One hopes to delay preparing for the end of their life as long as possible. But as the inevitable becomes acutely apparent, one ponders how and if their life’s footprint can be assuredly preserved as meaningful legacy.
Material Art Gallery.
When Harbertson visited the couple, she was struck immediately by Andrews’ paintings and how their presence consumed the couple’s home. Given her social network that included a good number of Utah artists, Harbertson understood these were serious works of lasting merit. Taking to heart one of the artist’s final wishes that somehow her own creative legacy could take hold once she was gone, Harbertson took up the mission, with the support and encouragement by Ron, Andrews’ husband. Harbertson reached out to Colour Maisch, co-founder of Material Art Gallery, which in a short time has become one of the Wasatch Front’s most worthwhile galleries for celebrating Utah’s most distinguished representation in various visual arts languages.
Three years later, that request has been fulfilled on several fronts. For its opening show in 2026, Material is presenting a posthumous exhibition of paintings by Andrews, an artist who crafted her visual language over the course of 50 years. The show is appropriately subtitled, Into the Light of Day.
Many of the works have never been publicly exhibited. It is a unique opportunity for Material, as the paintings are solely for exhibition, not for sale. More than 130 paintings have been inventoried and the Utah Division of Arts and Museums, Springville Museum of Art, and Salt Lake County Arts and Culture will be acquiring the works for their permanent collections.
Material Art Gallery.
The paintings provide compelling evidence of the fruits of Andrews’ self-directed exploration in developing her creative language on canvas. Inspirational artists such as LaConte Stewart, Georgia O’Keeffe and Guy Wiggins, as well as artists associated with the early-20th-century Old Lyme Art Colony were the impetus for her, as she articulated and honed her expressive language on canvas.
In many respects, Andrews’ paintings evoke a well-considered fusion of elements of visual language that one might associate with artists such as Mark Rothko, Edward Hopper and Jackson Pollock. We might gather a bit more about Andrews’ internal psyche, by closely observing her paintings. She was a self-effacing artist with a profoundly meditative perspective. She layered ephemeral moments of discovery and appreciation with the inevitable melancholic contemplation that while immortality is unlikely, remembrance of place and the power of legacy can become sufficiently reassuring.
In an excellent profile feature published in 15 Bytes in 2003 by Shawn Rossiter, he captured the proper epiphany:
Andrews’ works do seem to have a very solitary quality to them. They are not lonely paintings, but they are scenes viewed by a person alone. She often paints that magical time of twilight when the sun has set but darkness has not yet taken over. She may paint the back of an old building at dusk. No figures are seen. Everyone has gone home for dinner. What is unique about her pieces is that she doesn’t seem to “show” the scene, as if it’s meant to say, “Hey, look at this.” The scenes are done for herself and the viewer is almost a voyeur into her personal moments.
The importance of this posthumous show cannot be overstated. Andrews enjoyed recognition and received numerous awards for her output. However, she stopped her shows for two decades when she went to a show in the 1980s at the Kimball Art Center. She realized the artist’s paintings at that show were identical to hers, except that he used watercolor rather than oils (Andrews’ preferred medium).
Regarding the blatant plagiarism, Rossiter wrote, “Andrews was surprised and hurt. A naturally shy person, she felt her personal life had been invaded, her ideas burglarized. Then she found out that it was a good friend of hers that had suggested the artist (i.e. thief) take the pictures. ‘When I found out my friend was kind of behind it, it was devastating, and I thought, “Oh, I’ll never show my stuff again.’”
Material Art Gallery.
Coming out of seclusion, Andrews said the upside was that her paintings “got better.”
The quest for legacy is individual, essential and universal. This particular exhibition and its backstory comprise a compelling elucidation of that personal quest. Regarding the conversations she had with Harbertson in the many months leading up to the show, Maisch explained, “At the heart of these conversations has been a broader question about how art changes through its encounters with viewers, and the beauty of that reciprocal relationship. During her lifetime, Karen’s [Andrews] work experienced very few such encounters, and we are eager to see how this exhibition may transform the aura surrounding her paintings.”
The show continues through Jan. 29. For more information, see the Material Art Gallery website.