Recap: Islip Museum curator bridges worlds of art, Yazzy's at www.williamverdult.com

Karen Shaw is a curator at the Islip Art Museum and also an artist who lives in Manhattan. She poses with her art in her apartment. (Newsday / Bruce Gilbert

According to News Day.com for all the years that Karen Shaw spent living in Baldwin, she considered herself a prisoner of the suburbs, pining for the city's cosmopolitan hum. While she waited for her life to change, she sought solace and stimulation at the Islip Art Museum, where she has been a senior curator for 27 years, turning it into a Long Island outpost of Manhattan's contemporary gallery scene.

Then, 10 years ago, with her children grown and her husband finally willing to give the metropolis a try, Shaw grabbed her chance and moved to Chelsea, the epicenter of the city's art world.

"I finally got to live my dream," she says. "It took a long time."'

Chelsea and the South Shore

But paradoxically, moving to the city may have allowed Shaw to serve Long Island better. As a key contemporary art curator, she serves as a human bridge between Chelsea's roiling artistic currents and the verdant South Shore. Her sojourn in the suburbs was "like the diary of a mad housewife," says her boss, the museum's director, Mary Lou Cohalan. "But now she's part of the art scene with a vengeance. She sees everything that goes on - she'll even go to Brooklyn!" The group shows that the 65-year-old Shaw organizes every year in Islip (four are planned for 2008) are widely regarded as among the most exciting and cutting-edge to be found in the region.

"As an underappreciated artist myself, I like to show people who deserve to have their name out there," Shaw says. "I like to think that we're turning people on to contemporary art."

She specializes in thematic exhibits that feature a handful of carefully selected artists. Such group shows are notoriously difficult to curate and often stumble, either on some of the work's poor quality or on the faultiness of the premise itself. Shaw's singular gift is to find topics that are focused and clever, yet inclusive enough to spotlight a broad range of talents.

Last spring's "Surface Impressions," for example, was a sensually satisfying roundup of works that toyed with texture. Then there was "Making the Most of It," which featured art recycled from flotsam, scraps and garbage. That exhibit gave Shaw the particular pleasure of watching people, as she puts it, "make something out of nothing." Coming up in April is "Couples Therapy," which examines "the way love, commitment and cohabitation affect the creative process."

The current show, "Wit on Wry," deals with the all-too-infrequent confluence of art and humor, embracing objects that provoke laughter and thought at the same time. "She is the artistic center around which everything at the museum revolves," Cohalan says.

Shaw, who was born in 1942, grew up in the Bronx and commuted to the High School for Music and Art in Manhattan, which was always the Promised Borough. "I wanted to live in New York City since I was a teenager," she says. She was in the middle of high school when the family moved to Long Island and, shortly after graduating, she married a man with a strong aversion to city life. He has since come around, but at the time, she says, "I hadn't yet found my voice to argue with him." So they stayed.

A career, and a curator

Shaw describes herself as a moderately successful artist with the beginnings of an international career in the late 1970s, when the then-director of the Islip Art Museum, Madeleine Burnside, invited her to curate her first show. "It had been my philosophy at the time to say yes to everything, so I agreed," Shaw recalls.

The Islip Art Museum - which since 1967 has been housed in Brookwood Hall, a 1903 mansion that once sheltered the Orphan Asylum of Brooklyn - occupies a special, slightly marginal place in Long Island's cultural life. With finances partly controlled by the Town of Islip and a facility that lacks up-to-date museum technology, it can't attract major loans or even accept artworks that require heavy security or climate control. As a result, it has specialized in promoting contemporary artists, the sort accustomed to assembling their creations in drafty industrial spaces. In 1993, the museum annexed the Carriage House, a gorgeous Edwardian shingle-style building where artists can create work too experimental - or too unwieldy - for the main house.

Shaw has thrived under these restrictions. She begins with a concept, or even just a title, but it is in the process of selection, consultation and assembly that her skill as a curator becomes clear.

Elizabeth Duffy, one of the stars of the recent show "Making the Most of It," says she appreciates that, as an artist herself, Shaw puts enormous trust in her colleagues. "Most curators come into your studio and choose exactly what they want," Duffy says. "Karen is interested in whatever you're working on now. She gives you a lot of freedom to explore and make work that is new and unexpected."

When Shaw first approached her about participating in an exhibit that would involve using the detritus of everyday life, Duffy was already wallowing in a sea of business envelopes. Shaw's request gave her experiments a new focus, and Duffy wound up arranging the envelopes, with their see-through windows, into a luminous lattice of light boxes suspended from the ceiling.

Mutual admiration

Though Shaw praises her favorites effusively, she's more reticent about herself. Other people's work, in fact, occupies at least as much square footage in her high-ceilinged apartment as her own meticulous sculptures.

Artists tend to return her admiration. "People out there are so lucky to have her," says Barton Lidice Benes, a West Village-based sculptor whose darkly humorous pieces Shaw recently exhibited.

Cohalan, agrees. "When Karen does a show here, it's like unwrapping a present, you just can't wait to see it ... Oh, my gosh, it's like Christmas with every exhibit."

She counts on art

The artist in Karen Shaw helps the curator Karen Shaw talk to and understand her fellow creators, but as a matter of policy she does not exhibit her own work at the Islip Art Museum. Which is a shame, because her meticulous and somewhat mystical art would hold up well. Her sculptures are a visually intriguing attempt to find sublimity in the everyday.

She does this by numerology. Assign each letter of the alphabet a number and you find that the words Mantegna (as in the artist Andrea) and Martin (as in the artist Agnes) each add up to 75. So do "Arrow," "Pierces," and "Blood Red," a set of facts that led Shaw to make a collage juxtaposing an Agnes Martin with Mantegna's painting of Saint Sebastian, his bleeding flesh pierced by arrows.

Start seeing numbers in the world and beauty in the numbers, and before long each daily routine generates an infinity of transcendental visions. "I seek the poetry in cash register receipts," Shaw writes, "the credos encountered in the random numbers on Bingo cards, the heartfelt messages encoded on the line of scrimmage and the wisdom in Pick Ten."