Karen Glaser
Aquascapes: Miami Seaport Project, 2002
Photographic imagery on gessoed canvas
Terminal 5, Miami Seaport

Chicago artist Karen Glaser has recently completed a major art installation for Miami-Dade Art in Public Places at Miami’s Seaport. Titled Aquascapes: Miami Seaport Project, the piece spans the 226-foot-long wall in the lobby of Terminal 5 and includes sixteen large-scale black and white photographs of marine life that flow over a background of crystalline blue water. Close-up perspectives of manatees, mangrove snappers, whale sharks and more create intimate portraits of these creatures. Through this construct, Glaser evokes a sense that the viewer is looking through the water to the underlying imagery or passing over the environment in a glass-bottom boat.

Glaser used traditional methods to photograph her subjects and subsequently rendered the images digitally on gessoed canvas. The photographic mural was then permanently adhered to the wall, creating a seamless undersea panorama that transcends the lobby space. All of the images were photographed in the inland springs and rivers of Florida and in various locales in the Caribbean.

Karen Glaser has been exploring underwater photography since 1983 when she received an underwater camera as a birthday present. “It changed my life,” she said. By the early 1990s, she was photographing manatee in their natural habitat, preferring black and white imagery to color and using natural light to capture her subjects.  Indeed, Glaser’s underwater photography is distinguished by her use of natural light and her celebration of the magnificent and surreal atmosphere that is created as light filters through the water’s particulate matter. 

Karen Glaser received her MFA from Indiana University, Bloomington and her BFA from Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City. She currently teaches at Chicago’s Columbia College. Her photographic images of manatees were exhibited at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and toured the nation through 2002 under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service in an exhibition titled Mysterious Manatees.  Glaser’s photographs, along with an essay by noted manatee expert John E. Reynolds, will be featured in a book on manatees that will be published in late 2003.  Her works are found in various collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

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