Karen Shaw, Islip museum curator and conceptual artist, dies at 83

Karen Shaw, formerly of Baldwin, was a widely exhibited conceptual artist. And she herself may have been her greatest concept.

Born in the Bronx and raised there and in Jericho — an artist from childhood — she married at 18 and reared two children on Long Island while creating some of the most avant-garde art of her time.

Shaw died from cancer at home in upstate Holmes on March 27 at age 83.

In the mid-1970s, when her artwork first began appearing at such vaunted galleries as Urdang and OK Harris in Manhattan, "She was a feminist and raising a family," said Mary Lou Cohalan, former director of the now-gone Islip Art Museum, where Shaw was senior curator for nearly 40 years.

"And a lot of what she did took advantage of the materials she used as a housewife. She had a famous body of work called ‘Summantics’ that used ordinary things like supermarket flyers" to find hidden meanings in everyday objects.

As a curator, Shaw’s Islip shows were "widely regarded as among the most exciting and cutting-edge to be found in the region," wrote Newsday in 2008. "Shaw’s singular gift is to find topics that are focused and clever, yet inclusive enough to spotlight a broad range of talents."

Through it all she remained an activist, from Vietnam War protests in the 1960s and ’70s to more recent work with the New Sanctuary Coalition, helping immigrant asylum-seekers find legal means to avoid deportation.

And she mentored many artists. At a Manhattan memorial after her death, "the place was crowded with friends and a whole bunch of people I didn't know," said one of her sons, David Shaw, of Brooklyn. "And these were all artists she had helped. And they emphasized to me how important her work at Islip was. She gave so many artists their first museum exhibition or first included them in shows, and they felt like they owed her so much."

Born Helene Karen Tobias on Oct. 25, 1941, she was the eldest child and only daughter of Jeanne and Emanuel Tobias. She attended the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan before graduating from Carle Place Middle/High School when her family moved to Long Island. She married Ronald J. Shaw in 1960 and moved to Flushing, Queens, and earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from Hunter College in 1965.

Around 1968 the Shaws moved to Baldwin, and many years later they began splitting their time between a house there and a co-op studio in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, hard by art galleries there. Starting as a guest curator at the Islip Art Museum in 1981, Shaw soon became senior curator, a position she continued even after she and her husband left Baldwin for Chelsea in 2003.

While she could not display her own work at shows she curated, Shaw exhibited in solo and group shows at such venues as Franklin Furnace and P.S. 1 in New York; the Nassau County Museum of Art, Mills Pond Gallery and Anthony Giordano Gallery on Long Island; and museums and galleries across the country and worldwide. Her work is in the public collection of more than a dozen institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art.

As a visiting artist or adjunct professor, she taught at nearly 20 schools, including Princeton University, Chicago’s Columbia College, Philadelphia’s Moore College of Art & Design, and Long Island’s Hofstra University and Southampton College. She won numerous awards and grants, and in April 1976 bested more than 3,100 other entrants in a New York Times contest to complete a Donald Barthelme short story.

With her family, "We did lots of traveling to the city, to galleries," remembered her other son, Stephan Shaw, of Brooklyn, who said she urged her children to find their own paths. "She fostered our interests. We grew up independent-minded."

In addition to her sons, she is survived by two brothers, Harris Tobias, of Charlottesville, Virginia, and Mitchell Tobias, of McLean, Virginia, and five grandchildren. Her husband died in 2020.