Raised on grit and ingenuity, Karen Motawi gave her daughter the freedom to choose her own path—one that led to Motawi Tileworks.
If you’ve ever sat in on a Nawal Motawi talk, you know how it often begins: a black-and-white photograph of her mother, Karen. Nawal uses it to make a simple, radical point—her mother taught her she didn’t have to fit the roles reserved for girls: nurse, secretary, teacher. She could choose her own path. That early lesson didn’t just shape her art; it opened the door to building Motawi Tileworks.
The first thing you notice at Karen Motawi’s mid-century Ann Arbor home are the house numbers made from 4x8 Motawi tiles—including the retired design, Rennie’s Lattice. Inside, the space reads like a quiet gallery: Karen’s handmade origami “quilts”—interlocking mosaics of multicolored paper—hang beside Motawi art tiles. Near the entryway hangs a green-hued 6x6 Marsh tile. The fireplace surround carries bold Zelda black tile patterns from floor to ceiling, while the bathroom pairs vertically oriented subway tile with borders of mosaic-style triangles. It feels like a laboratory of design—personal, precise, and lived-in. On the table during tea: shortbread with a chocolate-mint coating.
Early Life & Family
Karen grew up on a farm in Rockford, Michigan, where her father, Gerald Kitson, invented poultry feeders and egg-handling systems. She went to Michigan State University; that’s where she met Kamal, a Ph.D. student from Egypt. They were in a small summer calculus class together—she enrolled, he audited. One day he “chased after” her between classes and invited her to dinner. “Lobster at Howard Johnson’s,” she recalls—early in their courtship. After they married—and after he completed his Ph.D., she finished her B.A., and their first child was born—they moved to Cairo with a toddler and a few crates. When asked if she was nervous about moving so far from home, Karen’s answer was simple: “I was up for any adventure.”
Asked how her parents felt about her marrying an Egyptian, Karen paused: “They loved their family! They were very kind and gentle people. They were sad, of course. That I would be going halfway around the world. Taking their only grandchild.”
Cairo Years & the Six-Day War
On arrival in Egypt, a mid-voyage import duty change stranded the family’s crates, appliances, and two cars in customs. One day, Kamal spotted one of their confiscated cars on a Cairo street—repainted black but unmistakable because of a stain on the back seat where their daughter had spilled something. It had been taken out of customs by a minister.
While Kamal reported to his government post in Egypt’s agriculture department, a security guard agreed—for a weekly pack of cigarettes—to sign him in and out so he could spend his days navigating the bureaucracy to retrieve their belongings. Housing was scarce and required “key money”; after weeks of searching, a relative—seeing Karen in tears—relented and offered the family a modest flat whose one luxury was that it had a telephone.
Karen soon found work teaching English at the American Embassy. In June 1967, as the SixDay War began, the embassy closed and her American colleagues were evacuated; married to a local, Karen remained. She remembers blackout paint on windows, sandbags at doors, and calling her parents one last time before the lines went quiet. From a balcony, she and friends watched distant runways being bombed. After the closure, she taught at the American University in Cairo’s English Language Institute.
Through all of this, Karen kept Nawal speaking English at home: “Everyone around Nawal spoke Arabic… I had to insist she speak English to me. I was afraid she’d lose it.”
Nawal—the first-born—was fluent in Arabic by age four. People would sometimes assume the blonde child was German and say “Almanya” (Arabic for “German”). Nawal adopted that as the name of her imaginary friend.
Returning to Michigan & Raising a Big Family
Back in Michigan, Karen and Kamal stayed with her parents until Kamal found work at Gerber Products in Fremont. They eventually raised five children—and for a period also housed Kamal’s teenage brother from Egypt. Karen recalls delivering papers with her own kids when the teenager skipped his route, and the occasional scrape (“got in trouble for smoking marijuana… back when that was a problem”)—domestic vignettes of a busy, blended household.
Karen’s Career & Pragmatism
As the kids grew, Karen went back to school for an MBA (evenings at Grand Valley). She later joined Gerber Products in marketing, then pricing, and ultimately as Director of Customer Service. She wrote computer programs for business reports, back when some customer data still lived on card decks. “I was the first person that was not in the computer department that could write these… ‘Run me a report that says, X equals blah, blah, blah.’ So I learned how.”
Business-minded, pragmatic, and curious, Karen bridged numbers and operations long before analytics became a buzzword—another quiet throughline connecting her to the systems-thinking that later shaped Motawi Tileworks.
Karen’s Confidence and Nawal’s Path
In high school, Karen herself was discouraged from considering an art career: “I remember wanting to take art in high school, but the counselor said, ‘You’re too smart for that.’” That moment stayed with her, and she later made a point of letting her daughter know she didn’t have to accept the narrow roles so often laid out for women of her generation, no matter how seemingly well intentioned. That it’s OK to adventure and explore.
Nawal’s art spark, Karen recalls, was fanned by a middle school teacher, Ms. Vitek. She later studied at the University of Michigan, stepped away for a time, traveled, then returned. When asked whether she ever worried about Nawal’s twists and turns, Karen said: “I figured she’d do what she needed to do. Was I worried about her? No, never.”
After her time at Pewabic Pottery, Nawal set out to make tile on her own, and Karen and Kamal bought a house in Ann Arbor that would give their daughter space to live and work. From the garage on Packard Road, Motawi Tileworks took shape. Karen remembers the early growth as steady and frugal: “[The Tileworks] would find equipment at auction and bring it back.” The company eventually rented space on Staebler Road and expanded one room at a time.
Origami, Arts Council & Ongoing Making
Karen’s love of paper art began in Fremont, where she served on the board of the local arts council and helped host a cultural exchange with a Japanese sister city. On one trip, a traditional paper shop captured her imagination; she’s been folding ever since and now meets with a small, skilled origami club in Ann Arbor. Showing off a kinetic model, she laughs: “It’s not your typical crane; this one flies.”
Home, Again
With one owner in between, the Ann Arbor house Karen lives in now once belonged to Nawal. She moved to be closer to family and, in a way, closer to the work. The place is calm and orderly but alive with pattern—tile, paper, light. She may not throw clay, but Karen Motawi shaped something essential: permission. The permission to imagine a different life, to build slowly, to keep making—through war, bureaucracy, and the everyday mess of family—until beauty takes form.
Upcoming: Big Rapids
Karen plans to return to Big Rapids with Nawal on October 9 to attend her daughter’s talk at Artworks Big Rapids. The talk begins at 7 p.m. and is part of Tile by Tile: A Motawi Retrospective, an exhibition running throughout October. It’s a fitting homecoming: a celebration of a life’s work Karen Motawi helped make possible.
