Kimberly M. Becoat is a contemporary mixed media artist whose work is a stylistic abstraction with a conceptual investigation of new materials and visual experiences with social commentary.
She uses a variety of art materials including acrylic paint, sumi ink, and watercolor as well as less conventional items like sand, tar paper, foil, candy wrappers and other detritus. Her most recent abstract & conceptual work is an investigation of urban environments meant to create “urban displacement”, in public housing – aimed to surgically remove “massive amounts of Blacks and Latinos” into designated forgotten pockets of city landscapes. She reimagines these spaces in colors reflecting hood staples found in bodegas (corner stores) and street styles and urban games. Other continuing bodies of work cover conversations about the Black body as labor, consumption and industry in her Urban Hottentot and High Cotton series respectively. These works use collage and fabric and pulled cotton as their medium narrative.
Kimberly has been featured in a number of exhibits including her current solo exhibition; URBANIA at MoCADA Museum in New York, Welcome to Urbania at RUSH Arts Gallery NY (solo exhibit), New Abstractions at Essie Green Galleries (solo exhibit), Capital One Bank in NY, BAMart at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, and Deutsche Bank as well as the television shows, Insecure on HBO, Netflix Original Series “Luke Cage” and the FX series, The Americans.
Kimberly’s work has also been added to the permanent collection of the prestigious Schomburg Center for Research and Black Culture in Harlem New York.
A few other exhibitions include: Last Supper, Latchkey Gallery, NY, Creative Climate Award Art Nominee, Human Impacts Institute, NY, Prizm Fair, Miami, FL., In Plain Sight/Site, ArtSpace, New Haven, CT., Pressure Points, Art on the Vine, Martha’s Vineyard, Dadaesque, 701 CCA Gallery (Columbia, South Carolina), Respond, SMACK Mellon Gallery, (Brooklyn, NY) Honoring Romare Bearden, The Corridor Gallery (Brooklyn, N.Y.) and Dirty Sensibilities: A 21st Century Exploration of the New American Black South, at the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, New York, NY.
Kimberly is a native New Yorker, born in Harlem NY – and presently resides and works as an artist in Brooklyn, NY.