ICA Miami welcomed New Zealand-based artist Susan Te Kahurangi King as she led one of her signature hands-on events, “Shut Up and Draw.” The event demanded collaborative involvement by audience members, who drew 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 sprawled 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.

Part of Idea 006: Defiant Subjectivities

In a world in which experiences are continuously quantified and plotted as information, in which projection models and risk assessments guide our behavior, in which PR and polls drive our politics, there are individuals who function unencumbered by the ubiquitous condition of data. They carve out unlikely and often defiant practices in a world that feels increasingly flattened into numbers and trend reports. Laura Lima, Renaud Jerez, Susan Te Kahurangi King, and Ida Applebroog, each with unique agendas and strategies, make a case for the continued significance of subjectivities that find in defiance a constitutive trait.