I seek the human rights storytelling possibilities of art, printmaking, pop-up paper engineering, film, and spoken word poetry: to celebrate the courage, resilience, realistic hope, and fearless joy in our struggles to claim our human rights for our lives and the survival of our communities.
Tara Krause is an artist, printmaker, spoken word poet, and filmmaker with Frontline Arts and Warrior Writers NJ. She now micro-farms a reclaimed terroir of roses and aromatic plants in the mountains of New Jersey. When not painting large scale roses with her fingers, she is linocut engraving social justice printmaking pop-ups on handmade Frontline Paper reclaimed from combat uniforms and medical scrubs.
In the COVID pandemic she began performing spoken word poetry with Poetic Theater Productions' Veterans Voices in 3 shows. She was a featured solo performer for 10th Annual Poetic License Festival 2021.
Atelier trained as a painter, she studied at Art Students League in NY. In 2000, she produced a women's human rights short video series which premiered at the United Nations and was distributed in over 60 countries. From 2002-2005, she explored computational complexity with the Wolfram Science Summer Institute transdisciplinary team.
Tara graduated from West Point in the first classes of women, and was co-captain of the Army lacrosse team. She is a disabled veteran and was an Army field artillery captain in the nuclear cold war and first gulf war. She graduated from NYU with an Executive MBA.
An artist must live with her antennae constantly alert for the perturbations of ideas, movements and events most likely to change the facts of our lives --- and then respond fully, with vital authenticity at the core primal level, with a fearlessness and openness that risks total vulnerability, in order to assert and celebrate our humanity in the times we live.
Presently I am consumed by the quest for, and expression of, the primal. I seek those images that catch my breath, shattering the icing-glass defenses of media saturated ennui and critical analysis, and in firing my neurons, rock me to my Paleolithic core.
In side wormhole searchings, perhaps it is imbued with some sort of unconscious recognition of – and hunger for – self-organized complexity, that moment when my pigments and media cohere into a cascade of new meaning, recognizable but not rational. Perhaps it is based in some neural law(s). I get lost in trying to explain the self-evidence, immersed mute in the raucous silence of the ineffable, yet dancing the rhythm of my visual language.
Alive, my imagination sparks, with the songs of the past sung with the rituals of the present to weave the vision and language of the future(s). I sense the kernel(s) of our humanity and environment in the story space(s) of the universe. And at that moment, the eddies of complexity gift up glissandos and persistent structures to lead us to transcendence.