Kim Beck is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator whose work explores the everydayness of disaster. Through looking closely at the ground, from pavement and potholes to weeds, and slowly at the everyday and built environment, from signs to billboards, her work reflects ecological crises in the natural world. Moving fluidly between weaving, photography, print, drawing, sculpture, and installation, she employs a wry humor and curiosity to ask questions about our place in the everyday landscape.

Kim Beck has created "Grand Openings" at the Grand Canyon and skywriting events from New York to Missouri. Her work has been displayed on billboards along I-70, in auto repair lots, botanical gardens, and on rooftops along the High Line in NYC, and exhibited at the Walker Art Center, Carnegie Museum of Art, Smack Mellon, Socrates Sculpture Park, Warhol Museum, OK Center for Contemporary Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Art Omi, Yale School of Architecture, and Hallwalls Center for Contemporary Art. She has received fellowships from prestigious institutions such as MacDowell, Yaddo, the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Art Omi, the Bemis Center, ISCP, the Montalvo Art Center, and VCCA. Additionally, she has been honored with awards from ARS Electronica, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Cité des Arts, and Printed Matter. Beck holds a BA from Brandeis University and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Originally from Colorado, she currently resides in Pittsburgh, where she serves as an Associate Professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon.

Longer bio:

Kim Beck has created “Grand Openings” at the Grand Canyon and skywriting events from New York to Missouri. She has produced flags for flagpoles, billboards and signs along I70, in auto repair lots, in botanical gardens, and on the High Line in New York City. Moving fluidly between photography, print, drawing, sculpture, and installation, her work has been exhibited at the Walker Art Center, Carnegie Museum of Art, Smack Mellon, Socrates Sculpture Park, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, Warhol Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Omi International Arts Center, Catharine Clark Gallery, Mixed Greens, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art's 100 Acre Park.

Kim Beck's artistic journey is shaped by her global experiences, including time spent as an exchange student in Japan and travels across Japan, Australia, and Europe as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow. During these travels, she collaborated with Japanese papermakers, French photographers, and Australian Aboriginal painters. Beck holds a BA from Brandeis University and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Originally from Colorado, she now resides in Pittsburgh, where she is an Associate Professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.

Beck has been recognized with fellowships from prestigious institutions such as MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. She has been a resident at She has held artist residencies at Mass MoCA, Art Omi, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, VCCA, Montalvo Arts Center, ISCP, and Cité International des Arts and she has received awards from ARS Electronica, the Heinz Foundation, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and Printed Matter, among others.

Contact: kimbeck@idealcities(dot)com

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work highlights the everydayness of disaster. Using photography, print, drawing, sculpture, weaving and installation, I examine our relationship with both built and natural landscapes by slowing down and looking at what is normally overlooked. I find beauty and absurdity in moments like cracked pavement and weeds, which reveal deeper ecological issues. My projects, including grand openings at the Grand Canyon, pothole performances, a cross-country road trip with a mirrored MINE sign, skywritten messages, hand-drawn "for rent" signs, and large billboard sculptures, serve as playful disruptions that underscore the stress on infrastructures and economic systems. Casts and rubbings of potholes transformed into gleaming glass sculptures and vibrant flags prompt us to find beauty in the mundane. Photographs of asphalt, cyanotypes made from stones, and weavings of rubbings and photographs reinterpret brief breakdowns as dazzling, disorienting surfaces that signal larger systemic issues. My interventions, from empty billboards to playful signs leading nowhere, encourage observation. My concept of "landscape" includes everything from weeds to the Grand Canyon, illustrating human impact. By blending representation with abstraction, I challenge perceptions of how landscapes are constructed and understood. Like a pothole that forces a reevaluation of the road, my art seeks to transform perspectives and inspire viewers to actively engage with their environments.

Longer statement:

My work draws attention to the “everydayness of disaster” in the landscape. From cracked pavement to weeds, I find humor and absurdity in overlooked elements, revealing deeper ecological and existential concerns. Through photography, print, drawing, sculpture, and installation, I question our place in the built and natural landscapes.

 My work evokes the tradition of landscape painting while upending it, replacing the sweep of valleys and canyons with everyday weeds, lawn, and billboards. I have a background in printmaking and drawing. I make images and things through a process of iteration, using commercial materials as readily as handmade. Composer John Cage described the world as a thing becoming, a process; this idea: things becoming, or becoming undone is the subject of my work. I have stopped traffic to cast a pothole in the middle of the road: the road is no longer a means of conveyance, but the destination.

A Grand Opening banner and booth celebrates the Grand Canyon; hand-drawn space-available signs fill shop windows like their commercial counterparts; these phrases are written above the city by a skywriter and then printed and mounted on billboards, keeping the impermanent skywriting from disappearing too quickly. Fake empty billboards sit atop rooftops, barely noticeable; signs in a park point every which way like a Dr. Seuss garden folly. All of these disruptions, whether theatrical or inconspicuous, reframe the everyday landscape. Landscape is the tuft of weeds behind the dumpster, the backyard, the pothole, the grassy median in the parking lot, the Grand Canyon. It is owned, developed, privatized, made public, ignored, fertilized, depleted, enriched—changed. I use both representation and abstraction to question ways land can be constructed, changed, and understood.