Highly regarded artist Elizabeth King will give a free public lecture about her work entitled, Size Matters, on Wednesday, February 2, at 7:30 p.m. at Mary Baldwin University in Francis Auditorium on the corner of Coalter and Frederick streets.
King is a multi-media artist whose work combines sculpture, film, and installation. Her conceptual approach to art-making is interdisciplinary, with her ideas and research extending into fields such as physics, literature, and philosophy. Intimate in scale ‘ she speaks of a theater for an audience of one ’ and distinguished by a level of craft that solicits close viewing, her work reflects interests in early clockwork automata, the history of the mannequin and the puppet, and literature’s host of legends in which the inanimate or artificial figure comes to life.
Her work is in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She is represented in New York by Kent Gallery and by the Allan Stone Gallery. Her book, Attention’s Loop (A Sculptor’s Reverie on the Coexistence of Substance and Spirit), was published by Harry N. Abrams in 1999; and, she is currently finishing a second book, written with co-author W. David Todd of the Smithsonian Institution, that is a study of a Renaissance automaton in the Smithsonian collection and the legend behind it. The title is A Machine, a Ghost, and a Prayer: the Story of a Sixteenth-Century Mechanical Monk.
King earned both a BFA and a MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University as School of the Arts research professor in the department of sculpture and extended media.