Susan Te Kahurangi King (born 1951) is an

autistic Autism, also known as autism spectrum disorder (ASD), is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by differences or difficulties in social communication and interaction, a preference for predictability and routine, sensory processing di ...

artist from

New Zealand New Zealand () is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and List of islands of New Zealand, over 600 smaller islands. It is the List of isla ...

who found international fame in 2009.

Biography

She was born in Te Aroha in 1951. King is a self-taught artist whose ability to speak declined by the age of four, and by the age of eight stopped speaking altogether. She has methodically created an entire analogous world through drawings using pen, graphite, coloured pencil, crayon and ink. In the middle-to-late 1970s, King produced intricate, hypnotic dreamscapes that powerfully blend animals, humans and inanimate objects into networked tapestries. During the 1980s, King began to reduce the representational content of her drawings, instead focusing on diagrammatic compositions with a cell- or map-like structure. King drew prolifically through to the early 1990s. After, for an unknown reason, she suddenly stopped. King resumed drawing in 2008 when documentary film maker Dan Salmon began filming her and her art. Art collector and

curator A curator (from , meaning 'to take care') is a manager or overseer. When working with cultural organizations, a curator is typically a "collections curator" or an "exhibitions curator", and has multifaceted tasks dependent on the particular ins ...

Peter Fay discovered her work and curated a solo show for her in Sydney in 2009. In 2013 King showed at the prestigious Paris Outsider Art Fair. In 2015 she had her first solo US show ''Drawings from Many Worlds'' at the Andrew Edlin Gallery in New York. In July 2016, King's debut museum exhibition opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. Her work was exhibited at the Marlborough Contemporary gallery in London in 2018 and at the Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in 2019. King has public collections held by

Te Papa The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa is New Zealand's national museum and is located in Wellington. Usually known as Te Papa (Māori language, Māori for 'Waka huia, the treasure box'), it opened in 1998 after the merging of the Nation ...

The Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, and includes over 200,000 works of arc ...

Philadelphia Museum of Art The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) is an List of art museums#North America, art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The main museum building was completed in 1928 on Fairmount, a hill located at ...

Chartwell Collection
and th
James Wallace Arts Trust
A monograph of King's work was published in 2016 by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. King also contributed to the 2016 anthology of New Zealand women's comics, '' Three Words''. In 2016 the

American Folk Art Museum The American Folk Art Museum is an art museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, at 2 Lincoln Square, Columbus Avenue at 66th Street. It is the premier institution devoted to the aesthetic appreciation of folk art and creativ ...

founded the Susan Te Kahurangi King Fellowship program. In 2024, MARCH Gallery published "Susan Te Kahurangi King: Character Development", a taxonomy of figures used by King within her drawings which are accompanied by notes from King's sister, Petita Cole. The publication was released in conjunction with a solo exhibition of King's works at MARCH titled "The Gradual and Inevitable Dissolution of

Mickey Mouse Mickey Mouse is an American cartoon character co-created in 1928 by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks. The longtime icon and mascot of the Walt Disney Company, Mickey is an anthropomorphic mouse who typically wears red shorts, large shoes, and white ...

" in June 2024.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:King, Susan Te Kahurangi New Zealand Māori artists 1951 births Living people People from Te Aroha Outsider artists Women outsider artists 20th-century New Zealand women artists 21st-century New Zealand women artists Autistic artists New Zealand people with disabilities Ngāti Hauā people