ICA Miami welcomes New Zealand-based artist Susan Te Kahurangi King as she leads one of her signature hands-on events, “Shut Up and Draw.” The event demands collaborative involvement by audience members, who will draw a large-scale mural on the walls of ICA Miami’s multipurpose room. Taking as its starting point motifs from Susan’s drawings, the mural will sprawl into a delirious landscape of colorful forms and warped fragments.
Since early childhood, King has made drawings composed of undulating lines of bold color, refined renderings, and energetic relationships between appropriated cartoon characters, many of which predate Pop art. As ICA Miami’s exhibition demonstrates, from the artist’s early mature work to her more recent meditations on line and color, the self-taught King’s creative output depends on the open-ended process of looking.
At the age of four, Susan Te Kahurangi King (b. 1951, Te Aroha, New Zealand) ceased speaking and began to draw prolifically. She continued to draw well into her thirties, until she abruptly stopped. After a twenty year lapse in drawing, she resumed in 2008, picking up where she had left off. Over the last eight years, King has generated a remarkable output of intense and enigmatic drawings that stretch space and volume in unorthodox ways.
