Karin Batten: Painter, Sculptor, Printmaker

Born in Hamburg, Germany, to immigrant parents from Poland, Karin Batten made her way to London for art college, earning a BFA from Central Saint Martins. Before eventually settling in New York, Karin lived with her husband, journalist Tony Batten, in San Francisco and Washington D.C. Much of her artwork has political underpinnings, including exhibits that she organized. Her extensive website includes artwork inspired by her world travels. She has an MFA from Hunter College and has taught at a number of colleges, including some twelve years at Parsons School of Design. She has had a long successful relationship with the June Kelly Gallery in New York City. She is the recipient of Pollock-Krasner grants. In 2001, Karin moved to Westbeth with her son Justin. From 2016 to 2019 she served as visual arts chair on WARC [Westbeth Artists Residents Council].

Terry Stoller spoke with Karin Batten in June 2026, and they also communicated via email. Their conversation covered Karin’s arts education in London, the art techniques she uses, the shows she organized in New York City, her experiences at her studio in the World Trade Center in autumn 2001, her term as director of the Westbeth Gallery, and her association with the June Kelly Gallery.

Before you went to college, you were doing artwork with your friend Monika. The two of you left Hamburg for London to study art at Central School of Art and Design.

We had gone to the same high school, and we drew outside, around Hamburg parks. Our mothers wanted us to get married, but we had other ideas.

Drawing session with Monika, in Hamburg. Colored pencil.

Monika’s older sister came back from London and told us we could get jobs there and go to art school there. We applied as au pairs, and we both got a job. I became an au pair for a little dog, and she had two little children to take care of. We went to the school; we signed up. We had the money for the first semester, and once we could speak more English, we went there. I fell in love with the program immediately. I loved the director of the school, and we stayed in contact for many years. I could do sculpture there. I could learn all about mixing colors. And I learned how to paint with gouache, all the different tools. There were two schools at the time. One was for life drawing. The school I went to (they’re now together) was all about the basic things you have to know to do any artwork, like perspective. I loved doing ceramic sculpture there.

Working on ceramic sculpture at Central School of Art and Design, London.

I met a woman, a ceramicist that lived in the building that Monika and I moved into. She was so nice. She said, “I want to take you to meet Henry Moore and Michael O’Connell. They are two elderly gentlemen, artists; they’re my friends, and I think Michael might need an assistant.” They had two huge estates north of London, in Much Hadham. Henry Moore took me to his stone quarry where he got his ideas for his sculpture and told me I could take one. Michael was doing painted textile hangings with African content. He only worked outside on large tables. He showed me how to paint with tube squeezers, which was new to me, but I learned fast. We did large murals for schools, government, hospitals, altar pieces.

The students at the art school were from all over—from Britain as well as India, Denmark, Holland, Sweden, and Germany. It was international. We became friends and shared information. I was doing ceramic sculptures, paintings and drawings. The director of the school thought I was very good, so he asked me to do a presentation of my work. After London, I made a decision to be an artist and not a musician, which I had been studying since I was 6.

Later, you were able to move to the U.S. You were teaching in New York City in the mid-seventies before you went on to San Francisco.

In 1978, I found out I had won the first place for the international poster competition for Expocuba. I was flown to Havana to receive my prize.

Prizewinning poster for Expocuba, 1978.

While I was living in New York City, I joined a drawing program at Columbia University. I made friends and moved to San Francisco. There I painted wood panels for children, animals in bright colors, which I sold.

I met and fell in love with Tony Batten. He was from the West Indies, but he grew up in New York City. He was highly intelligent, and was a journalist for KQED TV station. We got together, and rented an apartment in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s house. His daughter was one of my students at Head Start, where I was teaching collage and watercolor. At the same time, I went to San Francisco State College to take Chinese art and American history. I really wanted to know about the history of this country.

Then you moved back to New York and separated from your husband. I’d like to talk about how the political informed your artwork. I’m interested in an outdoor show in 1985 that you helped organize for a “political art park,” titled “La Lucha Continua / The Struggle Continues.” That was on the Lower East Side, on Ninth Street and Avenue C.

I organized it with another woman, Eva Cockcroft, whom I had met at PAD/D [Political Art Documentation/Distribution]—a political organization against the war, and that was perfect for me. I joined them, and I said, I’d like to help. I handed out flyers, and I also designed some flyers. I met people that I’m still in contact with. So I met Eva Cockcroft, and she knew I was doing political art, and she knew the park. It was so awful, and the kids didn’t have anything to play with there. She said, We have to go through every building and ask the landlords if we could use the walls of the buildings. They all said yes because they hated the park. Then we figured we had these walls, we need to get artists to do political paintings on them. And that’s how we got twenty-six artists for the twenty-six murals. They all had a political theme having to do with racism or hunger, homelessness. My mural was on Nicaragua because we were bombing Nicaragua while the kids were in school. Cliff Joseph from Westbeth painted a mural.

Mural for La Lucha Continua, political art park, Lower East Side, 1985.

How big were the murals?

Very large, about 30 feet wide. Mine had neighborhood children sitting and doing their homework. In the front I had a big old farmer, and a big cow next to him. I also made a mural of James Baldwin for the Bronx River Art Center.

James Baldwin mural, right, painted on metal gate, Bronx River Art Center, 1980s.

In the early 1980s, you had mounted a show called “Contamination.” Tell me about the inspiration for that exhibit.

There was a nuclear accident near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. We were afraid that it would explode. In New York City, people went to Florida, and I went to Florida with friends. When I came back, I started researching this nuclear issue. I found out about nuclear testing in Nevada, the fallout in Utah, and soldiers being exposed. I made a lot of paintings of that. I researched and I found out that they have underground shelters for corporations in the Catskills.

Here are some of the titles of your paintings: Corporate Underground Shelters, We Want Peace, March on Harrisburg, Reagan’s Inauguration, Soldiers and Workers Radiated for Profit.

This was at Gallery 1199, at the health care workers union. It was so important, the director said, I’m showing every single painting. They did a beautiful job. The other thing is I was very scared because a lot of people didn’t think the way I was thinking. But nothing happened. This exhibition also went to Berlin at Galerie 70. That was important. People from Hamburg came to see it.

Exhibition poster featuring image of Corporate Underground Shelters, 1982.

In the early 2000s, you were able to get a studio along with a group of artists at the World Trade Center. How did you get that?

I was teaching at Parsons, and I had taken the students up to the 91st floor. (I always like to paint from above. I put canvases on the floor, and I start drawing with charcoal and with a big brush on a stick, I add colors.) I got a message that the LMCC [Lower Manhattan Cultural Council] was giving artists studios up there, and I immediately applied. And why I got it was I had done a lot of work from above, from planes because I was traveling at the time between Europe and here. I photographed and made a lot of paintings from them, and I also did one of the Twin Towers. They said yes, you can come April to November.

Twin Towers from above, two months before Sept. 11, 2001. Acrylic

This was 2001.

Luckily, I took some photos from the 91st floor of Tower One before 9/11, one of the Trinity Church down below and the Millennium hotel. But none of that was damaged. The view from the World Trade Center that I had was uptown, west and east. I did paintings of the Brooklyn Bridge. And I did one of the West Side Highway with Westbeth in it. And the Empire State Building. Pfizer bought the whole collection, and the 9/11 museum has two paintings.

Manhattan from the 91st floor of the World Trade Center, 2002. Oil stick on paper.

In early 2002, you participated in a panel at Pace University titled “Confusion in a Time of Uncertainty: Life after September 11th,” moderated by Jon Stewart.

They invited me. I guess they saw the article in New York magazine about me and what happened on 9/11. I was very nervous because I appeared with Susan Sarandon and Spalding Gray—it was part of the Tribeca Film Festival. I talked about what I experienced.

[Editor’s note: Karin had not yet arrived at her studio when the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers took place.]

Did you lose paintings from the studio on 9/11?

I lost my paintings. I lost all my materials and a shelf and a worktable. I lost my camera.

Where were your other paintings?

On 28th Street in Chelsea; I had a studio there for twenty years. I now have a studio in the I Building at Westbeth, which I love.

You wrote me describing how the view from your Westbeth studio inspired a series of paintings.

When I rented the studio I have now in the I Building, the first paintings were of the view from my studio, the Hudson River. I painted the Hudson four different times of the day, morning, noon, afternoon, and evening. I used a new method of presenting the mood of our great river, so you clearly can see the waves. I used a special carved tool with thick paint that I made with acrylic gel which created a texture that highlighted the waves. It had a sculptural feeling. Texture and colors play an important role in my paintings.

Views of the Hudson River from Karin’s Westbeth studio, at noon and evening. Mixed media.

In 2011, your work was exhibited at the West Baton Rouge Museum in Louisiana, in a show titled “Cathartic Art: Remembering September 11th.”

Three hundred people came to see me there and to hear me talk. I brought all my paintings down. That was great.

Presentation at West Baton Rouge Museum, Louisiana, 2011.

On your website you have abstract paintings that represent the places you’ve traveled to.

That’s actually philosophical to me. I learned about meditation and Buddhism. I felt it was important to meet other cultures and see how they lived. So I went to India, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Canada, Brazil, and Peru. In 2012, the Parsons School of Design asked me to teach painting in the Dominican Republic. It was a lot of fun. And in northwest Brazil, where my son was born, I had true adventures and got many ideas for paintings, visiting the Amazon Enchanted Forest in Alter do Chao by canoe and swimming with dolphins.

Amazon Forest, collage and painted paper.

When I went to India, that was the biggest shock I ever had in my life; it was so different from what I had experienced. My many paintings were shown everywhere. I went to many residencies. I was in Yaddo for three months, and painted about the environment. That was very exciting because I met a lot of painters and writers who were well known. I went to Vieques, Puerto Rico, where I rented an apartment, sketched the environment and scuba dived. As a swimmer, I saw many new marine species. When Hurricane Maria happened in 2017, the storm hit Vieques first and hardest. I went there to help the people who were affected; most of them were seniors.

One residency you wrote me about was in Costa Rica.

In Costa Rica, at the residence, I had no more paper for my sketches and found some banana paper—which I didn’t know existed. I tried it out, but it was too thin. My solution was using round Melitta coffee filters. I painted with gouache, in bright colors on panels. They looked beautiful and were transparent against the light, like stained glass windows. I mounted them on embroidery frames.

In 2016, you became the director of the Westbeth Gallery. How did that come about?

I was living here in 102A. George Cominskie said Jack Dowling didn’t want to do the job anymore. He said, Go upstairs and show Jack your portfolio, and let’s see what happens. I went up there and showed Jack my résumé and website, and he said, There’s no problem. Of course, we would love to have you. I said, It would be nice if we would work together, but I would do most of the work—because it was on the computer. He said, Absolutely. Westbeth was in some trouble because the shows weren’t diverse enough. I said, I would do my best. I belong to a large art group in New York, and my gallery in New York, June Kelly Gallery, represents a diverse group of artists from different cultures.

You happened to start at the Westbeth Gallery the year there was a controversial holiday show. The holiday show is generally for all the Westbeth artists to display a piece of work, but this was in 2016 after the election of Donald Trump, and the show became “Write Now.” At that time, there was a “Subway Therapy” public arts project, started by Matthew Chavez, which let people express their feelings, including on Post-its for display on the walls of the 14th Street subway corridors. “Write Now” would emulate that in the Westbeth Gallery.

We said that every artist could contribute a piece of their work, anything they wanted. And we would also have this other project, with the guy sitting there if they wanted to talk to him. But nobody would come through with it. George and I didn’t know what to do.

So that’s how it turned into just the Post-its event for people to make comments on, throughout the whole gallery.

Which we really didn’t want to do. Roger Braimon was also involved with this. We did check with several people about “Write Now.” It was something that we felt was important and that people might also want to put in work. But all of a sudden it became a controversy.

Do you have special memories from your time as director of the gallery?

I loved it. I did a show in 2017, “The Fiber Matrix,” that everybody loved. It featured work by a group of black women who were members of the artist guild Quilters of Color Network of New York. They had tables in the gallery and were quilting there. A young man, William Daniels, organized this, for them to come and stay with us.

I was really looking for different kinds of shows. There was a show in March 2017 that was beautiful and had large audiences. The artists Thaddeus Radell and Ro Lohin had contacted me and showed me paintings that were imaginative. They used different materials for landscapes and called the exhibit “On the Shoulders of Giants.” The artists had a great sense of humor visible in their paintings.

You’ve had a longtime association with the June Kelly Gallery. How did that come about?

The painter Al Loving introduced me to June in 1988. June had worked in museums and opened the gallery in 1987 in SoHo. June said come by, show me some slides, and we will talk. I was doing a lot of seaside paintings, about the environment, the fish, the beaches. That first exhibit was with another artist. In 1990 I had a solo show there. It was an interesting show, and was packed with visitors. The gallery sold many of my works. After eight solo shows, a ninth show in autumn 2025 was a great success.

Would you like to say anything about Westbeth?

I love living here. I love my studio in the I Building. I’m so glad I’m here. I’m safe. My son Justin loves it here. I love doing the work here. I volunteer for everything that I can do, if I have time. I appreciate everybody that lives here. And we have lots of things going on all the time. I hope many people will come and see what we’re doing here.

For more about Karin’s artwork, go to karinbatten.com and
westbeth.org/artist-page/karin-batten/.

Terry Stoller is a Westbeth resident and author of Tales of the Tricycle Theatre.

Profiles in Art, Copyright 2026 Terry Stoller and Westbeth Artists Residents Council