Update 31 July 2024 POSTERS Karen began, in the 60s, to design posters for special festivals or concerts with which she was involved. While living in Japan, she enjoyed the challenge of visualizing combinations of multiple layers possible with the silk screening process—such imagining, perhaps, more than the process of screen-printing itself. Karen grew up in an artistic family in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Later, in Japan, this visually engaged background was reinforced by frequent exposure to Ukiyo-e wood block prints and the lively contemporary art scene in Tokyo galleries and concert halls.       She explored not only silkscreen design and printing, but also the use of varied lettering stencils available then in Tokyo. They allowed complex montagings in which single letters paralleled the artistic use of the traditional Chinese ideographs that the Japanese had borrowed. All of these elements—layering, montaging, and typographies—were eventually melded into 21st-century digital media, which she primarily uses now.