Karyn Olivier (born 1968) is a Philadelphia-based artist who creates public art, sculptures, installations and photography. Olivier alters familiar objects, spaces, and locations, often reinterpreting the role of monuments. Her work intersects histories and memories with present-day narratives.
Early life and education
Olivier was born in 1968 in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, where she and her twin sister lived with their family before they moved to Brooklyn, New York, in early childhood. Olivier received a BA in psychology from Dartmouth College in 1989 and an MFA in ceramics from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2001. She now resides in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is also an associate professor in the Sculpture department at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Work
In Olivier's work, familiar objects, spaces and locations are altered in function and medium to create uncanny meditations on stagnancy, division and the weight of materiality. Her sculptures, installations and public art explore the politics and poetics of space, and the role of viewers in shaping their own experience and engagement. Olivier has been engaging with and reinterpreting the role of monuments creating both temporary and permanent sculptures, installations and "monuments."
Selected works
The Battle Is Joined (2017) was a temporary public sculpture in collaboration with Monument Lab and Mural Arts Program. Olivier concealed the Battle of Germantown Memorial (Vernon Park, Philadelphia) with a mirrored acrylic structure. This "initiated" a conversation between two monuments in the park—Pastorius Monument, which honors Francis Daniel Pastorius, a German settler who led the first Quaker protest against slavery in 1688, and the Battle of Germantown Memorial, honoring a failed George Washington-led revolutionary war battle. Hyperallergic's Samantha Mitchell commented "Karyn Olivier's "The Battle is Joined" approaches the question of what might be done with existing monuments to update their contemporary resonance. Surrounded by a full-scale box made of mirrored Plexiglas, the original monument is turned into a shimmering, reflective void, almost invisible from some angles, mirroring both a dense green canopy of leaves and a bustling but economically depressed strip of Germantown Avenue bordering the park. Altering the face of this often-overlooked monument to early American history to make it an inclusive reflection of the present community has particular resonance for Olivier, who lives in Germantown and has spent a lot of time discussing the monument with her neighbors.
Witness (2018) At the University of Kentucky's Memorial Hall, Olivier created a permanent site-specific installation. She reproduced the African American and Native American figures from a controversial New Deal-era fresco inserting these images onto the domed ceiling of the vestibule, which she had gold-leafed. Four portraits of important (but under recognized) individuals in Kentucky's history are presented in the circular medallions below the ceiling. Around the base of the dome is a Frederick Douglass quote: "There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him." The Herald-Leader Editorial Board said "What a beautiful — literally, beautiful — response to concerns that a New Deal-era mural at the University of Kentucky was racially insensitive to 21st century viewers."
Here and Now/Glacier, Shard, Rock (2015) was Part of Creative Time's exhibition Drifting in Daylight. Olivier created a lenticular billboard that blended contrasting topographic and anthropologic histories through three images—a glacier, a pottery shard from the historic Seneca Village settlement, and an image of the contemporary landscape. The Wisconsin Glacier travelled through what is now New York City, 20,000 years ago. Seneca Village was a vibrant Manhattan settlement founded by free black property owners who were displaced when the city claimed the right of 'eminent domain' to purchase their properties and develop Central Park. As noted in Nature's Nation: American Art and Environment "As one observer explained, the work "elegantly reminds us of the constantly mutable nature of the park and its history," including its geological past and its modern political ecology. Here and Now reframed Olmsted's picturesque landscape from Olivier's viewpoint as an African American woman attentive to human difference and non-human agency."
Other activities
Olivier served on the jury that chose the winners of the Rome Prize for the 2023–24 cycle, co-chaired by Naomi Beckwith and Fred Wilson.