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Karen Benjamin started her art career as a painter. By 1993 her paintings had begun to evolve as abstractions of geometric designs, a significant departure from the realistic rendering of portraits and landscapes she had favored in earlier works.

In two years she mastered the techniques of woven tapestry, and in the process she was able to combine her interest in color with Amish quilt designs, Navajo geometry and the Southwestern landscape. Now she could make personal statements with a weaving style uniquely her own.

Karen has become one of New Mexico's top tapestry artists in the few years that she has been weaving. Her background in painting is evident in her sense of color and skill in composition. The compositions have a wonderful sense of stability even though they can be wildly asymmetrical. She firmly believes that meditative space and mood are expressed better through weaving that any other medium - that weavings' quiet, accumulative working process shows up as content in the completed piece. What Karen tries to capture in her weavings, and create for the eye and mind of the beholder, is a sense of serenity.

Karen's skill as a dyer makes it possible for her to achieve tremendous luminosity in her tapestries by manipulating value and intensity, even when there are only two basic colors. Although she has been trained in European tapestry techniques, her works seem very connected to the southwest. By using a technique similar to the European method of hatching (shading), she has constructed her own system of coordinating the verticals and horizontals so that there are subtle geometric patterns that form the texture of a composition. This makes for very contemporary and unique works of art.

Karen Benjamin received the Best of Show award at Fiber Celebrated '99, an international juried fiber art exhibit at the Albuquerque Museum.