Karyn Olivier

KARYN OLIVIER, born in Trinidad and Tobago, creates sculptures, installations and public art. In 2023 and 2024, Olivier will unveil two memorials in Philadelphia—honoring a former slave at Stenton House, and commemorating more than 5,000 African Americans buried at Bethel Burying Ground. Last year Olivier participated in Documenta 15 and installed a permanent commission for Newark Airport’s new terminal.

Olivier has exhibited at the Gwangju and Busan biennials, the World Festival of Black Arts and Culture (Dakar, Senegal), The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Whitney Museum of Art, MoMA P.S.1, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Contemporary Art Museum Houston, The Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh), SculptureCenter (New York), ICA Watershed Boston, among others. Solo exhibitions include Everything That’s Alive Moves at Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (2020), and A Closer Look at Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis (2007). Olivier presented her first solo exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (New York) in 2021.  

Olivier has received numerous awards, including the 2020 Anonymous Was a Woman Award, the 2018–2019 Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, the New York Foundation for the Arts Award, a Pollock- Krasner Foundation grant, the William H. Johnson Prize, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award, a 2019 PEW Fellowship, a Creative Capital Foundation grant, and a Harpo Foundation grant. 

Olivier’s work has been reviewed in ArtForum, The New York Times; Time Out New York; The Village Voice; Art in America; Flash Art; Mousse; The Washington Post; Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art; Frieze; the Philadelphia Inquirer and Hyperallergic, among others.