{"person":[{"sourceId":{"label":"Source ID","value":"2601"},"lastName":{"label":"Last Name","value":"King"},"endDate":{"label":"Death Date","value":"0"},"displayName":{"label":"Name","value":"Susan Te Kahurangi King"},"objects":{"label":"Objects","value":{"objectTitle":"Untitled / Untitled","objectNumber":"2018.14.1a,b","objectID":"6770"}},"geographyDied":{"label":"Died","value":["Te Aroha","Auckland"]},"biography":{"label":"Biography","value":"Over decades of drawing, Susan Te Kahurangi King has evolved her work from distortions of familiar cartoon characters to incredibly detailed organic abstractions. Her crayon and pencil drawings, which she started around the early 1960s, break down the imagery of her childhood, such as Donald Duck, Woody Woodpecker, and Mickey Mouse. These characters are warped, flattened, cropped, and rearranged; over the years they have become more fractured , sometimes deconstructed into just their iconic colors and forms. Because she works by memory and imagination rather than directly from the comics and toys that initially inspired her, King\u2019s drawings have a spontaneous, freeform style. Over time, she has shifted from loose crayon drawings to more expressive abstract works that are usually first outlined in graphite and then filled with colored pencil or marker. By the 1970s, she was making minutely sketched pieces in which dense geometric formations contrast with empty spaces on the page.Born in 1951 in Te Aroha, New Zealand, King grew up in a farming town. She stopped speaking at a young age and later was diagnosed as autistic. As a child, she was always drawing, a talent that her family nurtured. Stays in a psychiatric ward as a teenager led to a darker quality in her work, with scenes of violence and crying faces accentuating the complex and often chaotic tableaux of pop culture characters, animals, and human figures all entwined.Although her family carefully archived her hundreds of drawings, they were not publicly exhibited until 2009 at the Callan Park Gallery at the University of Sydney in Australia; her first museum exhibition was held in 2016 at ICA Miami in Miami, Florida. This international attention came after she had returned to drawing in 2008 following a long pause that began around the early 1990s; in her renewed practice she has moved into more abstract and intricate compositions that still frequently pull in fragments of cartoon characters. King continues to work in Auckland, New Zealand, deftly melding the cartoonish and the abstract.Allison C. Meier, 2025Text written as part of \u201cRethinking Biography,\u201d an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)."},"geographyActive":{"label":"Active","value":["Te Aroha","Auckland"]},"geographyBorn":{"label":"Born","value":["Te Aroha","Auckland"]},"beginDate":{"label":"Birth Date","value":"1951"},"firstName":{"label":"First Name","value":"Susan"},"primaryMedia":{"value":"https://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/23313/full"},"names":{"label":"Names","value":"Susan Te Kahurangi King"},"displayDate":{"label":"Date","value":"(b. 1951)"},"id":{"label":"Id","value":"151514"}}]}