Contact
Research Areas
Visual Art; Public Memory; Feminist Theory; Holocaust History
Education
Ph.D., Union Institute and University
M.Ed., Lesley University
B.F.A., Mass. College of Art and Design
Links
Curriculum Vitae (pdf)
Karen Frostig
Karen Frostig
Karen Frostig works as a conceptual, interdisciplinary artist engaged in international activist projects dealing with traumatic memory, inherited erasures, and new forms of testimony. She exhibits her work across the U.S., and in Europe and the Middle East. Her recent project “Exiled Memories” represents a transnational, intergenerational conversation about the Holocaust and is permanently installed at the University of Vienna’s Institute for the Philosophy of Law.
Associate Professor at Lesley University and Resident Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, Frostig lectures internationally and has published a series of books and journal essays about a variety of topics including visual art, critical theory, Holocaust history, feminist theory, cultural pluralisms, and new pedagogies. Frostig’s interest in feminist scholarship, inclusive organizational structures, and transnational activism permeates her work, aligning agency with social consciousness. She is in the early stages of developing “Orte der Erinnerung/The Danube Memorial” project, a bold new concept in memorial practice. Controversial by design, the project challenges prescribed habits of remembrance and fixed formulas of memorialization. Integrating collective memory with participatory experience, memory is performed as a cultural encounter, negotiating the past with the present and the future.
Current Projects
I will straddle multiple projects dealing with Holocaust memory and artistic production; introducing two new memory panels for the Exiled Memory project, and designs for two new international “living” memorial projects, located in Vienna and Riga. In both memorial projects, I am supplanting ideas about rupture with ideas about continuity.
Representative Publications
Frostig, Karen, and Halamka, K. A, editors. Blaze: Discourse on Art, Women and Feminism. 2nd edition. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009.
Frostig, Karen. “Importing Arts Activism and the Culture of Dissent into the Classroom”. The International Journal of the Arts in Society, 5(3), (2010):193-202.