Kim Beck is an artist whose work pays close attention to what gets overlooked: the cracked surface, the volunteer weed, the patched road, the ordinary rock. Working across weaving, photography, printmaking, drawing, sculpture, and artist's books, she moves between close studio investigation and public gesture, asking what we're missing when we look past what's frayed or falling apart. Her work is wry and tender, and has appeared everywhere from highway billboards to the rim of the Grand Canyon.
Kim Beck has created Grand Openings at the Grand Canyon and skywriting events from New York to Missouri. Her work has appeared on billboards along the I-70 corridor, in auto repair lots, botanical gardens, and on rooftops along the High Line in New York. She has exhibited widely, including at the Walker Art Center, Carnegie Museum of Art, The Andy Warhol Museum, Smack Mellon, Socrates Sculpture Park, OK Center for Contemporary Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Art Omi, Yale School of Architecture, and Hallwalls.
Beck has received fellowships and residencies from MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and has been an artist-in-residence at Mass MoCA, Art Omi, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, VCCA, Montalvo Arts Center, ISCP, and the Cité Internationale des Arts. Her work has been recognized with awards from Ars Electronica, the Heinz Endowments, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and Printed Matter, among others.
Beck earned her BA in Visual Art and Theater from Brandeis University and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design. She is a Yale Norfolk alumna, a Thomas J. Watson Fellow in Japan, Australia, and Poland, and a Professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. Originally from Colorado, she lives and works in Pittsburgh.
Artist Statement
I've spent twenty years looking at things that I've spent twenty years looking at things that hide in plain sight: cracks in pavement, weeds in concrete, a pothole patched with mismatched asphalt, a rock wearing a costume made from an asphalt rubbing. These aren't symbols, or not only symbols. They're things I find genuinely interesting: the way a surface holds time, the way something broken keeps going, the way an ordinary material can become strange if you stay with it long enough.
My work moves between two impulses that don't always agree with each other. One is close, quiet attention: making a rubbing, weaving a photograph, recording the scatter of pebbles with cyanotype. This impulse is patient and material and sometimes meditative. The other is a pointed finger: the mirrored #MINE sign dragged across the country, the Grand Opening party thrown for the Grand Canyon, the empty billboard sculpture on a building pretending to be a billboard, the signs leading nowhere. This impulse has teeth. It's not angry exactly, it's more like insistent. It wants you to see what ownership does to a landscape, what disposability costs, what gets erased when we only pay attention to what's new or polished or profitable.
Both impulses come from the same place: a conviction that what's overlooked is worth looking at, that deciding what's worth looking at is never neutral, and that looking itself — carefully, persistently — is a way of making change.
Recently, my work has gotten slower and stranger. The rocks, the cyanotypes, the weavings of roads — these feel less like arguments and more like investigations. I'm less sure what I'm trying to say and more curious about what the materials know. That feels right for where I am.