Lucy Kim

Lucy Kim is a Korean-American interdisciplinary artist working across painting, sculpture and microbiology. In her hybrid works, she embraces distortion as the pressure point to deconstruct how we see what we see: the relationship between our evolved vision-centricity, constructed socio-cultural systems, and personal desires.

Kim is a recipient of the 2022 Creative Capital Award for her project printing images with bacteria that has been genetically-modified to produce melanin, the bio-pigment behind human skin, hair, and eye color. She began this project while an artist-in-residence at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and continues to develop it at Boston University, where she teaches. Through this project, Kim expands her committed study of distortion, which she first began in her sculptural paintings using unconventional processes in the studio.

Kim received her BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of  Design (2001), and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art (2007). Recent exhibitions of her work were held at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Broad Institute, Cambridge, MA; Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, New York, NY; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; Tufts University Art Gallery, Medford, MA; Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore, Saratoga Springs, NY; Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY; Galerie Pact, Paris, France; Lundgren Gallery, Mallorca, Spain; Lisa Cooley, New York, NY; Fused/Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Lyles and  King, New York, NY among others.

In addition to the Creative Capital Award, Kim is a recipient of the 2019 Mass Cultural Council Grant, 2017 ICA Boston James and Audrey Foster Prize, 2014 Artadia Award, MacDowell Fellowship, Hermitage Fellowship, and Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship. From 2018 to 2021, she was an artist-in-residence at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Reviews and features on Kim’s work have been published in The New Yorker, Juxtapoz, Bomb Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Brooklyn Rail, Art Papers, ARTNews, and Artforum, among others. Her work is in the collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Kadist Foundation, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the New York Public Library. Kim serves on the Board of Directors of Artadia, and is based in Cambridge, MA.

For more on Lucy, visit lucykim.com.