The sculptures of Karen Yank will be featured at Turner Carroll Gallery in a solo exhibition titled Lessons in Abstraction. The exhibition will have an opening event on September 19, 4–6 pm, with the artist present. Karen Yank, born in Wisconsin and residing in New Mexico, sculpts with steel to channel the open happiness of New Mexican vistas. An expert of outdoor installation sculptures with works collected publicly in Oregon, Rhode Island, New Mexico, and more, Yank has also been featured in the Albuquerque Museum, Rutgers University, and Skowhegan School. She received the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in 2022. This exhibition at Turner Carroll will showcase Yank’s outdoor metal sculptures and new outdoor and indoor wall sculptures. Agnes Martin, Yank’s lifelong friend and mentor, is also represented in the exhibition. While Martin exclusively worked within the square format, Yank’s use of the circular format created an ongoing dialogue between student and teacher—a conversation that continues in this exhibition today.
Exhibition didactic
SANTA FE, New Mexico – From September 19 to October 27, 2025, the sculptures of Karen Yank will be featured at Turner Carroll Gallery in a solo exhibition titled Lessons in Abstraction. The exhibition will have an opening event on September 19, 4–6 pm, with the artist present. Karen Yank, born in Wisconsin and residing in New Mexico, sculpts with steel to channel the open happiness of New Mexican vistas. An expert of outdoor installation sculptures with works collected publicly in Oregon, Rhode Island, New Mexico, and more, Yank has also been featured in the Albuquerque Museum, Rutgers University, and Skowhegan School. She received the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in 2022. Yank was deeply influenced by her mentor Agnes Martin–another winner of the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. Agnes Martin, born in Canada, moved to New Mexico in 1932 and began making abstract paintings inspired by Taos’ desert landscapes. After working with abstractionists like Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Indiana during a period in New York, Martin developed her signature style of large canvases and minimal grids which she breathed life into during her process-based painting method. Martin was inspired by Zen Buddhism and her works would often emerge during meditations or even dreams, always starting at the point of an empty mind.
Karen Yank met Agnes Martin in 1987 at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture where Martin was an artist in residence and Yank was an MFA student. Martin quickly recognized a kindred art philosopher in Yank, and encouraged her to value presence and growth over productivity. As Martin said “it’s better to be at the beach, thinking about painting, than to be painting thinking about the beach.” Both artists kept in close contact after moving back to New Mexico, and developed parallel methods of channeling the feeling of New Mexico’s inspiring and calming natural environment. Both Agnes Martin and Karen Yank emphasize that their art isn’t about directly depicting nature, but instead the happiness, energy, and sense of connection that emerges from experiencing it.
“My poems, like my paintings, are not about nature. It is not what is seen, it is what is known forever in your mind.” –Agnes Martin
Karen Yank preserved and expanded on Martin’s lineage of artistic thinking. Yank often finds that her pieces, too, come to her during meditations and dreams, and has continued to play with rectilinear forms. Yank notes that Agnes Martin’s work was in fact based on rectangles and not lines: Yank says “She liked rectangles because they were softer and, so whenever she did grids, if you look at them really closely, they’re little rectangles inside of the squares. “ But the circle was too expansive for Agnes Martin, and she didn’t like using the form. Yank, however, frequently incorporates the circle into her work to achieve a lighter, more open surface to balance the heavy sculptural materials she works with like steel.
Turner Carroll Gallery conceived Karen Yank’s solo exhibition inspired by the artist’s feature in the Albuquerque Museum’s 2025 show Abstracting Nature. Yank gave a lecture at the museum about the inspiration she draws from Agnes Martin, as well as an interview on Colores PBS, which shows the incredible depth of this connection. At Turner Carroll Gallery’s upcoming exhibition, indoor and outdoor sculptures of various sizes will be displayed.
Artist biography
Karen Yank has been commissioned to complete some of the largest public sculptural works in the Southwest, and her sculpture has been exhibited in museums and public collections including the New Mexico Museum of Art, Albuquerque Museum, NMSU Art Museum, New Mexico State Capital Art Collection, and the Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet in NYC. Yank received her MFA degree from Rutgers University and her BFA from the University of Wisconsin Madison. Karen’s mentor was the great contemporary artist Agnes Martin, who is well known for her minimalist grid paintings and drawings composed of horizontal and vertical lines. Yank adopted the circle, a shape mimicking the curve where the earth meets the sky, as her more organic signature shape. Karen has completed over fifty large-scale public commissions to date. Yank is represented at the Turner Carroll Gallery in Santa Fe and Atelier Newport on the east coast.