Before her marriage, Mabel Fairfax Smith listed herself in the San Diego directories under “artists” from 1919 to 1926, living on Pt. Loma. In 1926 she accompanied three other San Diego artists to the Santa Barbara School of the Arts where she studied bronze casting under Archibald Dawson from Glasgow. She studied with Leo Lentelli, Joseph Pennell, George Bridgmen and Frank V. Dumond at the Art Students’ League in New York.

Marrying about 1927, Karl thereafter seems to have split her time between San Diego and Houston, exhibiting in both places from the late 1920s to the early 1940s. Although primarily a sculptor working in stone, bronze and wood, she also produced prints, and taught a sketching class at the San Diego Zoo in 1930.

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