Kohl King is an interdisciplinary artist working across painting, installation, sculpture, and mixed media. Her work explores questions of memory, vulnerability, transformation, and the relationship between individual experience and the larger world. Through an experimental and materially driven practice, she works with both traditional and unconventional materials, allowing process and material behavior to shape the development of each body of work.

Born in India, King received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Georgia and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Arizona. She also studied at The Cooper Union School of Art in New York, ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, and Florida International University.

Her work has been exhibited nationally at institutions including the University of Arizona Museum of Art and the Gallery of Contemporary and Indigenous Art in Tucson; the Torrance Art Museum; Otis College of Art and Design; West Los Angeles College; Fellows of Contemporary Art (FOCA) in California; and the Tate Gallery at the University of Georgia. In South Florida, her work has been exhibited at the Coral Springs Museum of Art, the Art and Culture Center/Hollywood, the Rosemary Duffy Larson Gallery, and other regional venues.

In 2025, King received an Artist Support Grant from the Broward Cultural Division and presented Soft Edges, a solo exhibition of her recent work. She is an Associate Professor of Art at Broward College, where she also serves as Director of The South Gallery.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Art is the way I have learned to understand, question, and connect with the world. I keep returning to the ancient Indian sutra Tat Tvam Asi—"I am that"—which expresses the idea that everything we encounter—materials, landscapes, memories, and one another—reflects something of ourselves. That philosophy continues to guide the way I see, think, and make.

The questions shift from one body of work to another, but I often return to the same ideas: how we navigate uncertainty, disorientation, and transformation; what remains, what disappears; and how our identities are continually reshaped by experience. I do not begin with fixed answers. Instead, each body of work becomes a way of thinking through these questions, trusting that meaning emerges through the act of making itself.

Rather than beginning with a predetermined medium, I let each body of work discover the form it needs. Materials are never neutral; they shape the questions as much as they respond to them, carrying and contributing to the work’s meaning. Whether I am working with paper, pins, glue, tape, thread, fabric, or the layered surfaces and mark-making of more traditional media, the physical qualities and behaviors of those materials become inseparable from what the work communicates. Through repetition, accumulation, repair, layering, and transformation, meaning develops through the making itself. In every case, the work unfolds through a sustained dialogue between material, process, and observation.

I work slowly and by accumulation, layering, removing, and revealing materials over time. Rather than resisting change, I allow materials to retain their own character and, at times, continue changing after a work is complete. The work develops through a sustained dialogue between intention, observation, and the unexpected, where meaning is discovered as much as it is constructed. Ultimately, I hope the work invites viewers to slow down, look closely, and discover their own points of connection. I am less interested in providing answers than in creating opportunities for reflection and recognition. I hope each work offers a space where the personal and the universal meet, reminding us that our most individual experiences are often part of a larger, shared human story.