Sam Kirk is a truly amazing artist and human. Beyond making incredible colorful mural art, and paintings suffuse with optimism, she is a community advocate and a Board Member at IPMM. Sam is the voice of the artist community on our Board of Directors, and is an integral part of our Permanent Collection. She’s a Southside Chicago native and portrays the city’s residents with an intimacy characteristic of her lifelong experience here. Her subjects are often folks from working class communities, who she gives space and joyful celebration in her paintings and murals.
Sam Kirk’s style makes use of bold, intricate lines that interweave and swell in waves and spirals. They make up faces, curls of hair and piled-up buns, bunching fabric, and bouncing background patterning. Her colors are bright and vibrant, animating city scenes with energy and sunlight. She believes in the power of representation and presence for traditionally underrepresented groups, and her figures span the full gradient of blacks, browns, beiges, and tans.
As a queer Chicagoan, a Southside native, and a CPS graduate, Sam Kirk’s work exists at the intersection of art and activism, a position that is very important to IPMM. We believe in the power of art to transform and revitalize communities, evident in the very work of artists like Sam Kirk.
Check out her new T-shirt design, which is part of our Fall 2020 Merch Drop!
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