Karen LaMonte (born December 14, 1967) is an American artist known for her life-size sculptures in ceramic, bronze, marble, and cast glass.

In 1990, after she graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) with a Bachelor in Fine Arts with honors, LaMonte was awarded a fellowship at the Creative Glass Center of America, in Millville, New Jersey.

In 1999, LaMonte won a Fulbright scholarship to study at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, where, in 2000, she created her first major work, Vestige.

In 2006, the Japan-United States Friendship Commission awarded her a seven-month fellowship to study in Kyoto, Japan; this trip inspired her Floating World series of works.

[6][7] LaMonte's art addresses themes of beauty and loss; her works use a sartorial lens to explore the fragility of the human condition.

LaMonte then used biometric data from Japanese women to build kimono forms in glass, bronze, rusted iron, and ceramic.

LaMonte entitled this series of sculptures Floating World, a name inspired by both Ukiyo-e woodblock prints and by the storied, arts-themed pleasure quarters of Edo-era Japan.

LaMonte built these sculptures from evening gowns of her own design, then cast them in white bronze, rusted iron, and blue glass.

I thought, wouldn't it be amazing if we could get a 'real' cloud and carve it in marble?LaMonte worked with Tapio Schneider, a climate scientist from the California Institute of Technology, to calculate and model the dimensions needed for Cumulus.

“It looks like folds of fabric or flesh tumbling through space.”[12] LaMonte's first dress sculpture, Vestige (2000), is an influential work of cast glass.

It was described by Habatat Galleries as a “glass sculpture that changed the course of art history.”[13] Vestige depicts a life-sized woman's dress, from which the wearer is absent.

Her Reclining Dress Impression with Drapery (2009) is part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Renwick Gallery’s permanent collection.

LaMonte writes about living “in the traditional kimono-making district of Nishijin":Even at night, my neighborhood hummed with the sounds of kimono production.

LaMonte's Etudes are smaller than the life-sized dress sculptures that first gained her widespread recognition and are crafted from white bronze, rusted iron, cast glass, and other materials.

She writes:I began to develop my one-third-scale models into a stand-alone group of sculptures that I called Etudes, a reference to my inspiration from the field of music from composers such as Frédéric Chopin.

LaMonte’s contributions in this arena involve both her inventive treatment of materials and form and her investigations of female identity and self-expression, which, as we have seen, strike us in both sensuous and abstract ways.

As the acclaimed British painter Cecily Brown has opined, “Painting is very good at saying more than one thing at once.” LaMonte’s Nocturnes affirm that sculpture is as well.

“Blind to colour but hypersensitive to texture, the paper on which the monotypes are printed renders an almost X-ray-like image of the garment,” wrote Richard Drury in the Sculptures and Sartoriotypes monograph, “a view through the layers of fabric - and through the tissue of time, to when the ripples and crumples we see in the prints were created by the active limbs of a unique human experience.