Kim Beck

Kim Beck (born 1970, Colorado) is an American artist living and working in New York City and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Beck works in drawing, sculpture, installation, photography, printmaking and multimedia, focusing her attention on subjects that might otherwise be overlooked. She is especially known for her artist's books and public artworks.

Beck's work has been reviewed by media such as Artforum,Art in America,Hyperallergic,KQED,The New York Times, and The Village Voice.

Adjutant is a temporary mural installed on the concrete wall beneath the 10th Street Bypass ramp for the Fort Duquesne Bridge in Pittsburgh, PA. The mural is composed of images of oversized common weeds using silhouettes in shades of black, gray and white. The mural is inspired by a riverfront scene described by Henry David Thoreau in his 1906 journal: "There they stood in the midst of the open river on this shallow and weedy bar in the sun the leisurely sentries lazily pluming themselves as if the day were too long for them. They gave a new character to the stream. Adjutant they were to my idea of the river, these two winged men.” A team of some 150 volunteers organized by Riverlife Pittsburgh executed the work June 6–14, 2015, during the Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival. The mural is part of #TBD, a concept for two public art projects that will bring dramatic changes and attention to the downtown Allegheny riverfront underneath the Fort Duquesne Bridge.

Mural Arts Program in Philadelphia commissioned Kim Beck to create a mural for the Room for Growth series of projects. Wildish, a mural designed and created by Beck at the Conestoga Recreation Center in West Philadelphia, features an assortment of plants from the surrounding neighborhood. Over the course of the project, students from the adjacent Mastery Charter School learned that many of these plants – often dismissed as weeds – have much deeper lineage as food, medicine and more. The final mural incorporates the research and artwork of Mural Arts students, and serves as a cornerstone to a larger initiative to modernize the Conestoga Recreation Center.

The Sky Is the Limit/NYC, consisted of fleeting messages from advertising billboards and storefront signage written by a skywriting plane over Manhattan. Executed October 10, 2011 in connection with her project on the High Line, phrases like "Last Chance" or "Now Open" gradually unfolded, and then faded back into the air, inviting viewers to interpret the language in their own unique way. With the uncertainty in the economy, The Sky Is the Limit/NYC was intended to play upon universal longings for hope and change by engaging the most potent symbol of longing in the landscape: the sky.

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