Karen Fike

Karen Fike is a Chicago-based visual artist working in acrylic and mixed media. Her atmospheric paintings use the female figure as a visual language — layered surfaces, symbolic imagery, handwritten fragments, and metallic accents that shift with changing light. Memory is her subject: what is remembered, what is withheld, and what reveals itself on a second look. Fike earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts, cum laude, in Theater and Scenic Art from the University of Texas at Arlington. Her background in scenic painting, interior design, and home staging informs her distinctive sense of composition, atmosphere, and spatial storytelling. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally — including Artbox Projects at the New York Art Expo, Woman Made Gallery, the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art, and Cartographies of Belonging at the Zhou B Art Center in Chicago (October–November 2026) — and appears in private collections across the United States. She lives and works in the Chicago area.