Elizabeth King is an American sculptor and writer known for movable figurative sculptures that she has employed in stop-frame animations.Princenthal, Nancy

''The New York Times'', August 30, 2017, p. C13. Retrieved June 10, 2022.Smith, Roberta. Smith, Roberta

''The New York Times'', May 14, 1999, B37. Retrieved June 10, 2022.King, Elizabeth
''Attention's Loop: A Sculptor's Reverie on the Coexistence of Substance and Spirit''
New York: Abrams, 1999. Retrieved June 27, 2022. Her work combines exacting handcraft, elementary mechanics, and digital and electronic technologies, applied in sculptures of half or full figures (generally scaled at half life-size), heads, arms and hands, or even simply eyes.Fleming, Lee
"Assemblage by Alchemy,"
''The Washington Post'', April 3, 1993, p. 62. Retrieved June 10, 2022.Cutler, Meredith. "Elizabeth King: The Sizes of Things in the Mind's Eye," ''Artscope'', 2008.Princenthal, Nancy. "The Physiognomist of Wonder,
''Elizabeth King: The Size of Things in the Mind's Eye''
Richmond, VA: Visual Arts Center of Richmond, 2007. Retrieved June 10, 2022. She often equips figures with subtly illuminated eyes and visible and invisible mechanisms enabling the performance of anatomically correct simple operations, seemingly of their own volition.Campion, Peter. "Brides of Frankenstein," ''Modern Painters'', November 2005, p. 109. Writers have described her figures as "insistently nonhuman" yet "uncannily alive"Ollman, Leah. "The Ghost in the Machine," ''Art in America'', October 2000, p. 158–60. in their ability to project self-awareness, intelligence, agency and emotion.Ryan, Dinah. "Elizabeth King," ''Art Papers'', 2008, p. 69.Singer, Emily
"Elizabeth King's Hyperreal Sculptural Portraits Confront Selfhood,"
''Artsy'', September 25, 2015. Retrieved June 10, 2022. They reflect her interests in early clockwork automata, the history of the mannequin and puppet, literature involving unnatural figures come to life, and human movement.Kistler, Ashley. "Elizabeth King's Mutable Theater,
''Elizabeth King: The Size of Things in the Mind's Eye''
Richmond, VA: Visual Arts Center of Richmond, 2007. Retrieved June 10, 2022.Princenthal, Nancy. "Artist's Book Beat." ''Art on Paper'', September–October, 1999, p. 70. ''Art in America'' critic Leah Ollman wrote that King's "highly articulated automatons invite us to consider how consciousness arises from physical being … she portrays her mechanical surrogates as convincingly self-aware, while we are left to ponder that age-old question: where exactly does the self reside?" King has received a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

, Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, among others.John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
Elizabeth King
Fellows. Retrieved June 10, 2022.Anonymous Was A Woman
Recipients to Date
Retrieved June 10, 2022.''Artforum''
"New Awards and Appointments,"
News. April 21, 2006. Retrieved June 10, 2022. She has exhibited in diverse venues ranging from commercial galleriesTanguy, Sarah. "Reviews, District of Columbia," ''Sculpture'', September-October 1993, p. 55–6.Campbell, Lawrence. "Emily Eveleth and Elizabeth King at Allan Stone," ''Art in America'', December 1996, p. 98. and museums such as

MASS MoCA The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) is a museum in a converted Arnold Print Works factory building complex located in North Adams, Massachusetts. It is one of the largest centers for contemporary visual art and performing ar ...

Mass MoCA
"Elizabeth King: Radical Small,"
Events. Retrieved June 10, 2022. and MAK (Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna)MAK (Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna)
Hello Robot
Exhibitions. Retrieved June 10, 2022. to the San Francisco

Exploratorium The Exploratorium is a museum of science, technology, and arts in San Francisco, California. Characterized as "a mad scientist's penny arcade, a scientific funhouse, and an experimental laboratory all rolled into one", the participatory natur ...

and the

American Psychiatric Association The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is the main professional organization of psychiatrists and trainee psychiatrists in the United States, and the largest psychiatric organization in the world. It has more than 37,000 members are involve ...

annual conference.DeCarlo, Tessa. "A Science Museum Embraces Art Through Anatomy," ''The New York Times'', August 6, 2000, p. 33–4. Her work belongs to public art collections including the

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

,The Metropolitan Museum of Art
pose 1
Art Collection. Retrieved June 10, 2022.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile, Los Angeles, California, Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits (George C. Pa ...

(LACMA),Los Angeles County Museum of Art
''Pupil'': pose 1
Collections. Retrieved June 10, 2022. Hirshhorn Museum,Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
''Pupil''
Collection. Retrieved June 10, 2022. and

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), is an art museum located in the Houston Museum District of Houston, Texas. With the recent completion of an eight-year campus redevelopment project, including the opening of the Nancy and Rich Kinder Build ...

.Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
''Pupil'': pose 1
Objects. Retrieved June 10, 2022.

Education and early career

King was born in

Ann Arbor, Michigan Ann Arbor is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan and the county seat of Washtenaw County, Michigan, Washtenaw County. The 2020 United States census, 2020 census recorded its population to be 123,851. It is the principal city of the Ann Arbor ...

in 1950 and studied at the

San Francisco Art Institute San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) was a private college of contemporary art in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1871, SFAI was one of the oldest art schools in the United States and the oldest west of the Mississippi River. Approximately ...

, earning BFA (1972) and MFA (1973) degrees in sculpture.Carlock, Marty. "Cambridge, MA: Elizabeth King," '' Sculpture'', October 1997, p. 59. She began attracting attention in the 1970s for theatrical, tableau-like works in exhibitions at the

Richmond Art Center Richmond Art Center is a nonprofit arts organization based in Richmond, California, founded in 1936. History In 1936, Richmond-resident Hazel Salmi began teaching classes under the Emergency Education Program (EEP) of the Works Progress Adminis ...

, Oakland Museum,

San Jose Museum of Art The San José Museum of Art (SJMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum in downtown San Jose, downtown San Jose, California, United States. Founded in 1969, the museum holds a permanent collection with an emphasis on West Coast of the United Sta ...

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art, and was ...

, and Hansen-Fuller Gallery, among others.Albright, Thomas. "Women's Exhibit Defeats Premise," ''San Francisco Chronicle'', February 23, 1971, p. 38.Crawford, Margaret. "Real California Girls," ''Artweek'', February 27, 1971.Shere, Charles. "Fine New Work at Art Galleries," ''Oakland Tribune'', July 4, 1974.Albright, Thomas. "A Little Jaunt around the Galleries," ''San Francisco Chronicle'', February 25, 1978.McDonald, Robert. "Expressions in Wood," ''Artweek'', May 19, 1979. This work combined found materials and crafted objects and employed marionette-style puppets (often caricature-like heads attached to jointed, skeletal bodies), kinetic and participatory elements, and narrative.Plagens, Peter. "Introductions '74," ''Artforum'', October 1974, p. 75–6.Annas, Teresa. "Moving sculptures deserve superlatives," ''The Virginia Gazette'', March 21, 1984, p. G18.Burkhart, Dorothy. "Artist's work sets the stage, then involves the viewer," ''San Jose Mercury News'', January 17, 1980. Reviews compared them to early 20th-century ''musée mécanique'' (

penny arcade ''Penny Arcade'' is a webcomic focused on video games and video game culture, written by Jerry Holkins and illustrated by Mike Krahulik. The comic debuted in 1998 on the website ''loonygames.com''. Since then, Holkins and Krahulik have establish ...

games)—toylike in operation and scale, yet involving themes of pain and isolation, as well as wonder at the workings of the human body.McDonald, Robert. "Introductions '74," ''Artweek'', July 27, 1974. For example, ''Theater'' (1972–3) involved a hinged wooden box attached to a chair that closed around a viewer's head and contained a mechanized, miniature theater "set" with a puppet of an old woman; it suggested a metaphor for interiority (being "inside one's head") or the notion of the " Cartesian theater"—the brain as a private chamber occupied by a homunculus. In 1983, King and her husband, sculptor Carlton Newton, moved to Williamsburg, Virginia to accept teaching positions. She joined the Department of Sculpture and Extended Media at

Virginia Commonwealth University Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) is a public research university in Richmond, Virginia. VCU was founded in 1838 as the medical department of Hampden–Sydney College, becoming the Medical College of Virginia in 1854. In 1968, the Virgini ...

in 1985, teaching there until retiring in 2015.Sinclair, Melissa. "Elizabeth King, Sculptor and Author," ''Style Weekly'', Women in the Arts Awards, March 2, 2016. In her art, King had turned almost exclusively to figurative sculptures by the 1980s, producing intimately scaled works that she gradually refined by perfecting traditional crafts such as carving, modeling, casting bronze, firing porcelain, woodworking and glass-eye-making.McGreevy, Linda. "Small Sculpture," ''Port Folio Magazine'', March 13, 1984. In these works modeled on herself and female relatives (e.g., ''Portrait of M'', 1983), she incorporated an increasing level of realism and a more fully articulated range of movement recalling 18th-century automata rather than dolls or puppets.Erickson, Mark St. John. "Reality and illusion," ''The Virginian-Pilot/The Ledger-Star'', March 18, 1984. One of these works, the half-figure ''Pupil'' (1987–90), would continue to appear in several later installation, animation and photographic works.Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
''Un/common Ground: Virginia Artists 1990''
Richmond, VA: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 1990. Retrieved June 28, 2022.Meskimmon, Marsha. "Becoming: Individuals, Collectives and Wondrous Machines," i
''Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics''
London: Routledge, 2003, p. 124–8. Retrieved June 28, 2022.

Later works and exhibitions

Beginning in the 1990s, King received wider recognition for meticulous figurative sculptures (of jointed full figures, heads, hands, arms, an isolated eye) exhibited with a greater emphasis on gesture, movement, and in presentation, on illusion and stagecraft. ''Sculpture'' described King's exhibition at Nancy Drysdale (1993) as "probing the fine line between human and machine" through "a painstaking search for the perfect gesture." The mutability of her figures—in terms of anatomically correct poses as well as context, across different exhibitions and media—is a key feature of King's art, related in part to the longstanding influence of traditional Japanese Bunraku theater, which employs puppets in different roles across performances.Volk, Gregory
"Performing Sculpture: A Conversation with Elizabeth King,"
''Sculpture'', July 1, 2009. Retrieved June 10, 2022.Fisher, Laurie G. "Machina," ''Art + Design'', Winter 2016. The notion of an inexhaustible range of poses complicates the status of her sculptures, implying a past and future, while also situating them in an indeterminate place between object or statue and robot.Kistler, Ashley. "In Conversation with Elizabeth King,
''Elizabeth King: The Size of Things in the Mind's Eye''
Richmond, VA: Visual Arts Center of Richmond, 2007. Retrieved June 10, 2022. Her miniaturized figures have been made in porcelain, wood, glass and brass, and employed disconcertingly lifelike details such as gently raised veins, creases and wrinkles, eyebrows composed of her own collected lashes, hand-blown glass eyes and functioning joints.McCormack, Ed. "Emily Eveleth and Elizabeth King: Two startling solos," ''Artspeak'', Spring 1996, p. 20. Their operations can involve hidden spring-loaded elements, magnets, pendulums and fiber optics, and visible hinged doors and exposed joints that intentionally break with illusionism. The joints, magnets and components that allow a sculpture to be posed and moved are an essential part of the finished image, with both sculpture and mechanism working equally to represent the alive, moving body. Writing about King's exhibition, "Attention's Loop" ( Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute, 1997), Marty Carlock suggested that such "peculiar dichotomies" created an aesthetic tension that fed into viewers' fascination with how both machines and humans work. King's later shows placed her sculptures in a widening range of contexts—custom vitrines, display cases also housing her source materials, multimedia installations—that used minimal means to convey emotional and psychological nuance: subtle movement, acute attention to pose, spare lighting and careful composition.Princenthal, Nancy. "Elizabeth King at Kent," ''Art in America'', May 2006, p. 187–8. These elements especially came into play when she began to "cast" her figures in photographic series and stop-frame animations involving painstaking pose adjustments in which they performed self-reflexive movements or simple tasks.Cohen, Mark Daniel. "Elizabeth King," ''Review'', May 15, 1999. These subtle, involuntary gestures—attuned to slight shifts in the tilt of the head or the touching of fingers, which can variously signal cognition, introspection, suspicion, or resignation, for example—often revealed ways the body unconsciously responds when the mind is active. For example, ''What Happened'' (35mm, 1991/2008, collaboration with Richard Kizu-Blair) depicted King's sculpture, ''Pupil'', in a responsive state reacting to unknown stimuli with common but eloquent actions: the tilt of the head while smelling, the tandem movement of fingers and eyes while sensing objects; ''Attention's Loop'' (1997) comprised 25 vignettes of a figure initiating and completing a gesture. ''New York Times'' critic Roberta Smith wrote about the simple movements of figures in the works ''Eidolon'' and ''The Sizes of Things in the Mind's Eye'' (both 1999), "at times the melancholy innocence of these creatures (enhanced by their newbornlike baldness) gives you a view of the human soul in its perpetual isolation." King has created several installations that juxtapose physical sculptures with their virtual, animated doubles. ''Quizzing Glass'' (2005) featured a fabricated single eye with movable, carved wooden lids and a video animation projected through a glass lens that appeared to hover in space, coming into focus only from a certain vantage point. In ''Bartlett's Hands'' (2005), she optically joined a hand-carved, posed wooden hand with a projected animation (made from 6,350 still images of the hand), using a wooden frame set at an exact viewing distance that made them appear equivalent in size and presence.Falkenberg, Merrill and Eric Fischl
''All the More Real''
Southampton, NY: Parrish Art Museum, 2007. Retrieved June 27, 2022. Critics suggest that King's co-presentation of work across media—and the resulting discrepancies in scale, substance and identification—create a sense of uncertainty and uncanniness that blurs perceptual boundaries between actual and virtual object, illusion and reality, human and non-human. Nancy Princenthal has noted King's shared concerns with other illusionistic figurative sculptors regarding artificial life and intelligence and the question of where "inanimate matter gives way to vital spirit." However, she contends that King's main interest lies less in technology, cyborgs or dystopias than in "a more innocent kind of wonder, something like the unrepeatable dumbfoundedness that … greeted the first moving pictures, or automatons." This sense is often conveyed through her figures' vivid, unblinking eyes, which invite considerations of consciousness and self-consciousness, vision as perceptual system, and connections between sensation, attention and understanding. In her traveling mid-career retrospective, "The Sizes of Things in the Mind’s Eye," (2007–9, initiated at

Richmond Center for Visual Arts James and Lois Richmond Center for Visual Arts is a visual arts center at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan Kalamazoo ( ) is a city in the southwest region of the U.S. state of Michigan. It is the county seat of Kalamazoo Coun ...

) and an earlier show at Kent Gallery (2006), King exhibited 25 years' worth of objects, including display cases and tables of antique wooden mannequins, acrylic and glass eyes, her own sculptures, half-scale figures in plaster and bronze, paper cutouts of body parts, and multimedia installations. The shows were described as evoking both her warehouse-size studio and a 16th-century cabinet of curiosities, with their "mix of obsolete, recent and not-yet-quite-born contributing to an odd temporal skid." King's 2015 show at Danese/Corey centered on the installation ''Compass'', which consisted of two wooden hands reaching for each other, one activated by a magnet at its base.Cohen, David
"Elizabeth King at Danese/Corey,"
''Artcritical'', October 7, 2015. Retrieved June 10, 2022. Her exhibition "Radical Small" at MASS MoCA (2017) paired large-scale projected animation side-by-side with the small-scale sculpture used to make it, while introducing a new, live filmmaking component in the gallery as its centerpiece. King worked in front of viewers with stop-motion animator Mike Belzer on a custom-built, vibration-free platform stage for seven days, painstakingly setting in motion a pair of jointed boxwood hands through a series of changing poses.Goukassian, Elena
"Testing Human Perception with Uncannily Kinetic Body Parts,"
''Hyperallergic'', November 30, 2017. Retrieved June 10, 2022.Gornik, April. "Sculptor Elizabeth King," ''Stay Thirsty'', 2018.

Writing

King has written extensively about automatons and other concerns related to her art.King, Elizabeth. "Inhale, Exhale, Pause: Breath and the Open Mouth in Sculpture," i
''Field Notes on the Visual Arts''
Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2019, p. 2–7. Retrieved June 27, 2022.King, Elizabeth. "Notes from the Field: Anthropomorphism," ''The Art Bulletin'', March 2012, p. 9–12.King, Elizabeth. "Clockwork Prayer: A Sixteenth-Century Mechanical Monk," ''Blackbird: An Online Journal of Literature and the Arts'', Spring 2002. Retrieved June 27, 2022. Leah Ollman described her book, ''Attention’s Loop (A Sculptor’s Reverie on the Coexistence of Substance and Spirit)'' (1999), as an intellectual, sensual and practical chronicle of the conception and creation of her work that "braids together philosophical and phenomenological musings with anecdotes, childhood memories, studio notes, fairy tales and legends."Eveleth, Emily. "Attention's Loop," ''Art New England'', December/January 2000–1, p. 5. Her sculpture ''Pupil'' is the book's main visual subject, depicted in photographs by Katherine Wetzel that explore representation and deception, and artificial and human. King is co-writing a second book, with clockmaker and conservator W. David Todd, ''Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend'' (Getty Publications, 2023), a study of a Renaissance automaton in the

Smithsonian Institution The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums and education and research centers, the largest such complex in the world, created by the U.S. government "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge". Founded ...

collection and the legend behind it.''Richmond Times-Dispatch''
"VCU sculptor wins Anonymous Was A Woman award,"
August 9, 2014. Retrieved June 10, 2022.Barry Art Museum
"How They Moved, How They Sounded,"
Event. Retrieved July 5, 2022. The automaton is the subject of a shorter essay, "Perpetual Devotion: A Sixteenth-Century Machine That Prays," that appears in the book ''Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life'' (2007).Riskin, Jessica (ed)
''Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life''
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Retrieved June 20, 2022.

Recognition

King has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship (2002) and awards from Anonymous Was a Woman (2014), the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2006),American Academy of Arts and Letters
"Awards."
Retrieved June 10, 2022.

Harvard Radcliffe Institute The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University—also known as the Harvard Radcliffe Institute—is a part of Harvard University that fosters interdisciplinary research across the humanities, sciences, social sciences, arts, a ...

(1996),McQuaid, Cate. Review, ''The Boston Globe'', October 11, 1996. Virginia Commission for the Arts (1996), and the

National Endowment for the Arts The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal ...

(1988).Ivey, Bill, Nancy Princenthal and Jennifer Dowley. ''A Creative Legacy: A History of the National Endowment of the Arts'', New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2003, p. 223. She has also received artist residencies from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (2017) and

Dartmouth College Dartmouth College (; ) is a private research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, it is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Although founded to educate Native A ...

(2008).Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
Past Residents, Captiva
Retrieved June 10, 2022.Dartmouth College
Past Artists in Residence
Artists. Retrieved June 10, 2022. In 2017, she was elected a member of the

National Academy of Design The National Academy of Design is an honorary association of American artists, founded in New York City in 1825 by Samuel Morse, Asher Durand, Thomas Cole, Martin E. Thompson, Charles Cushing Wright, Ithiel Town, and others "to promote the fin ...

.National Academy of Design
Elizabeth King
People. Retrieved June 10, 2022. She is the subject of a documentary film, ''Double Take: The Art of Elizabeth King'' (2018), directed by Olympia Stone.Floating Stone Productions
''Double Take: The Art Of Elizabeth King''
Retrieved June 10, 2022. King's work belongs to the public collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,

Hood Museum of Art The Hood Museum of Art is owned and operated by Dartmouth College, located in Hanover, New Hampshire, in the United States. The first reference to the development of an art collection at Dartmouth dates to 1772, making the collection among the o ...

,Hood Museum of Art
Elizabeth King, Idea for a Mechanical Eye
Objects. Retrieved June 10, 2022. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Sheldon Museum of Art,Sheldon Museum of Art
Elizabeth King
Collection. Retrieved June 10, 2022.

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, or VMFA, is an art museum in Richmond, Virginia, United States, which opened in 1936. The museum is owned and operated by the Commonwealth of Virginia. Private donations, endowments, and funds are used for the su ...

,Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Elizabeth King
Collections. Retrieved June 10, 2022. as well as to institutional and university collections.

Education and early career

Later works and exhibitions

Writing

Recognition

References

External links