Kara Maria Sloat

Born: 1968

Biography:

Kara Maria (born 1968), née Kara Maria Sloat, is a San Francisco-based visual artist known for paintings, works on paper and printmaking. Her vivid, multi-layered paintings have been described as collages or mash-ups of contemporary art vocabularies, fusing a wide range of abstract mark-making with Pop art strategies of realism, comic-book forms, and appropriation. Her work outwardly conveys a sense of playfulness and humor that gives way to explicit or subtle examinations—sometimes described as "cheerfully apocalyptic"—of issues including ecological collapse, diminishing biodiversity, military violence and the sexual exploitation of women. In a 2021 review, Squarecylinder critic Jaimie Baron wrote, "Maria’s paintings must be read as satires [that] recognize the absurdities of our era … These pretty, playful paintings are indictments, epitaphs-to-be." Maria has exhibited at venues including the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, de Saisset Museum, Nevada Museum of Art, and Sonoma Valley Museum of Art. Her work belongs to the public art collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and San Jose Museum of Art, among others. She is married to artist Enrique Chagoya.