Kim Beck is a multidisciplinary artist and educator whose work explores the everydayness of disaster. Looking closely at her neighborhood—from the potholes and rocks to signs and billboards—Beck’s work reflects the ecological crises in our backyards. Moving fluidly between weaving, photography, print, drawing, sculpture, and installation, she employs wry humor and curiosity to ask questions about our place in the 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, auto repair lots, botanical gardens, and rooftops along the High Line in New York, 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. 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 Mass MoCA, Art Omi, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, VCCA, Montalvo Arts Center, ISCP, and Cité International des Arts. She has received awards from ARS Electronica, the Heinz Foundation, 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 alum and a Thomas J. Watson Fellow in Japan, Australia, and Poland. Originally from Colorado, she resides in Pittsburgh, where she is an Associate Professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon.
Artist Statement
My work highlights the everydayness of disaster. I examine our relationship with our built and natural environment using photography, print, drawing, sculpture, weaving, and installation. 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, sky-written 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 more significant systemic issues. Arrow signs in a park point every which way like a Dr. Seuss garden folly. All these theatrical or inconspicuous disruptions reframe the everyday landscape and bring the overlooked into focus.
My interventions encourage observation, from empty billboards to playful signs leading nowhere. The landscape is the tuft of weeds behind the dumpster, the backyard, the pothole, the grassy median in the parking lot, the Grand Canyon — and all the critters and plants that inhabit it. By blending representation with abstraction, I challenge perceptions of how we know and experience our environment.