Karyn Olivier

2020 RAIR Fellowship Resident

artist website

The RAIR Fellowship Residency is a fully funded residency awarded outside of the open call, to one artist per year. Fellows are given project management and logistics assistance from the RAIR staff and they are able to customize the structure of their residency throughout the year. The Fellowship Residency offers artists a more intensive experience to assist in the development of new work.

Philadelphia sculptor Karyn Olivier was selected as the 2020 Fellow in the RAIR Fellowship Residency program.

Karyn Olivier (b. Trinidad and Tobago) received her M.F.A. at Cranbrook Academy of Art and her B.A at Dartmouth College. She has exhibited at the Gwangju and Busan Biennials, 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 (NY), Drexel University, the University of the Arts, Ulrich Museum of Art, University of Delaware Museum, among others. In 2017 Olivier installed a large-scale commissioned work for Philadelphia’s Mural Arts program in historic Vernon Park. In 2015 Olivier created public works for Creative Time in Central Park and NYC’s Percent for Art program. She has received the 2018-19 Rome Prize and has been the recipient of the 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 Creative Capital Foundation grant and a Harpo Foundation grant. Her work has been reviewed in 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, Hyperallergic, among others. Olivier is currently an associate professor and program head of sculpture at Tyler School of Art.