Matthew Kirk

The playful and critical potency of Matthew Kirk’s multi-disciplinary practice is forged through intuitive connections between lived experience and material relationships. Kirk’s abstract drawings and paintings on sheetrock and paper perform his distinctive, energetic mark making that brings conscious and subconscious references from comic, zine, and graffiti cultures to Navajo semiotics. His assemblage practice materially expands these references through a repertoire of found objects gathered on daily routes between his home, studio, and elsewhere. Citing humor as a healthy and essential tool in his life and work, Kirk says, “What seems like lightness can be disarming for some, as if I am not taking something serious enough, when in fact, the weight is so important that I need to engage it with the seriousness of humor.” 

Matthew Kirk was born in 1978 in Ganado, AZ, and spent most of his youth in Racine, WI. He has lived and worked in New York City for nearly two decades and is currently based in Queens. He is an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation.

Kirk’s recent solo gallery exhibitions include All Of Us. Both Of Us., Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis, MN (2025–26); Skinnin’ The Game, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, NYC (2026); and In a Time of Darkness, This is Wonderful News, de boer, Los Angeles, CA (2025). Recent group exhibitions include Hold to This Earth: Works by Contemporary Indigenous North American Artists from Tia Collection, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK (2026); Infinite We, Cara Romero Gallery, Santa Fe, NM (2026); Smoke in Our Hair, Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY (2025); The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition, Brooklyn Museum, NY (2024); Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination Since 1969, SITE Sante Fe, NM, USA (2026), MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina, SK, CA (2025) and Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2023); and The House Edge, The 8th Floor, NYC (2023).

Kirk’s work is collected by the North Dakota Museum of Art, Eiteijorg Museum, Gochman Family Collection, Forge Collection, Tia Collection, Everson Museum, and others. In 2019, he was the recipient of the Eiteljorg Museum Fellowship for Contemporary Native American Art.

www.mtthwkrk.org