Susan Te Kahurangi King was born in 1951 in Te Aroha, New Zealand. The second eldest of twelve children, she began drawing from a young age. King’s artistic abilities only increased with time; her teachers remarked on her renderings of complicated figures and her ability to concentrate on drawing for hours at a time. At five years old, King’s speech began to decline, and by the age of seven she had stopped speaking entirely. As her speech lessened, King’s commitment to drawing only increased. Even at seven years old, she was prolific and showed great promise as an artist.
In 1960, King’s family moved to Auckland for King to attend a newly established IHC school for children with learning disabilities, which she attended for almost three decades. Into adulthood, King developed a mode of deconstructing and expanding figures, incorporating characters like Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Cruella de Vil into elaborate, multi-planar scenes. She continued to make drawings until the early 1990s, when, during a difficult period, she stopped drawing altogether.
After almost two decades, King recommenced her work in 2008. Encouraged by renewed interest in her drawings and the upcoming production of Dan Salmon’s documentary, “Pictures of Susan,” she began making work in conversation with her final drawings of the nineties. In a matter of months, King had her first solo exhibition at Callan Park, Sydney, curated by Peter Fay. She swiftly went on to exhibit in Auckland, New York, and Paris, presenting her first museum exhibition at the ICA Miami in 2016. In 2018, she was awarded a Fellowship with the American Folk Art Museum (New York, NY).
King’s work resides in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), the Institute of Contemporary Art (Miami, FL), the American Folk Art Museum (New York, NY), the Te Papa Museum (Wellington, New Zealand) the Chartwell Collection at Auckland Art Gallery (Toi o Tāmaki, New Zealand), The Arts Trust House (Auckland, New Zealand), and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia, PA). She lives and works in Hamilton, New Zealand.