Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, Printmaking
Website: karamaria.com
Kara Maria was born in 1968 in Binghamton, New York. She earned both a BA and an MFA from the University of California, Berkeley, and has lived and worked in San Francisco since completing her studies there. Over a three-decade career she has built a body of work that moves between abstraction and representation, using layered fields of color and pattern to carry pointed social and environmental content.
Maria’s practice has been supported by a number of grants and residencies, including an Artadia award, the Eisner Prize in Art from UC Berkeley, a Masterminds Grant from SF Weekly, and residencies at the Montalvo Arts Center, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the de Young Museum Artist Studio, and Recology San Francisco’s Artist in Residence Program, where she painted directly onto canvases pulled from the waste stream. She is married to fellow painter Enrique Chagoya, with whom she presented a joint exhibition, Double Trouble, at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art in 2021.
Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, the Crocker Art Museum, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Weisman Art Foundation, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. She has had solo museum exhibitions at the de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University (2022) and the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art (2021), and her work has traveled internationally, including a 2025 touring show across galleries in Germany.
Maria’s paintings and works on paper read at a distance as pure abstraction — fields of collision, swirling color, and geometric mark-making in the vein of Pop art appropriation and comic-book vocabulary. Closer inspection resolves the chaos into meticulously rendered, miniature portraits of animals: threatened, endangered, or already extinct species set adrift inside the turbulence. The effect has been described as a weirdly joyful, kinetic mourning procession — compositions that hold celebration and elegy at once.
Her recent work is organized around the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss, but earlier bodies of work extended the same collage-like visual strategy to feminism, war, and the sexual exploitation of women, using recurring motifs — including a Seven Deadly Sins series — to fuse political content with decorative, high-energy surfaces.
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