Susan Te Kahurangi King
"Untitled", 1962-1964
Graphite and colored pencil on paper
7 x 4 inches (17.8 x 10.2 cm)
Courtesy of MARCH and The Susan Te Kahurangi King Trust

Selected by Julia Trotta 

Susan Te Kahurangi King was born in 1951 in Te Aroha, New Zealand. King’s artistic abilities were evident from a young age; her teachers remarked on her renderings of complicated figures and her ability to concentrate on drawing for hours at a time. At five years old, King’s speech began to decline, and by the age of seven she had stopped speaking entirely. As her speech lessened, King’s commitment to drawing only increased. Into adulthood, King developed a mode of deconstructing and expanding figures, incorporating characters like Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Cruella de Vil into elaborate, multi-planar scenes. She continued to make drawings until the early 1990s, when, during a difficult period, she stopped drawing altogether.

Encouraged by renewed interest in her drawings and by Dan Salmon’s documentary, “Pictures of Susan,” King recommenced her work in 2008. In a matter of months, she had her first solo exhibition at Callan Park, Sydney, curated by Peter Fay. She swiftly went on to exhibit in Auckland, New York, and Paris, presenting her first museum exhibition at the ICA Miami in 2016. In 2018, she was awarded a Fellowship with the American Folk Art Museum (New York, NY). King’s work resides in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), the ICA Miami (Miami, FL), the American Folk Art Museum (New York, NY), the Chartwell Collection at Auckland Art Gallery (Toi o Tāmaki, NZ), The Arts Trust House (Auckland, NZ), and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia, PA). She lives and works in Hamilton, New Zealand.