Neka King

January 6, 2021:  New Orleans native Neka King, who goes by NNEKKAA, is a visual artist, teacher, textile artist, digital illustrator, and muralist who now makes Atlanta her home. After graduating high school, she wanted to study fashion in New York City. Deterred by the high cost of fashion schools in New York, King enrolled in the Textile program at GA State which concentrated more on the art side of textiles than the fashion side. But this turned out to be just right for Neka. She took other courses that expanded her interests beyond textiles to include print making and digital art.  Neka received her BFA in Art with a concentration in textiles from GA State in 2016.  Initially working in textiles, she made the transition from textiles to digital art by posting her digital work on Instagram.

Here is the first thing that you will see on King’s website: “Know that my stance is for the humane treatment of all black beings and for the active pursuit to dismantle any systems or institutions which seek to deny us this.”  This is Neka’s way of “putting her foot down” and letting all of us including her future clients know where she is at.

To that end the silhouette-like black figures with piercing white eyes in her artwork are intended to have a slightly threatening edge. In a “Studio Noize” podcast from September 29, 2020 the artist said: “By simply having the figure stare back at the viewer, it’s not like this passive interaction; It’s like you have to look at this figure and the figure is also looking at you. It’s like a stance for power.  At the end of the day, the figure’s going to win because you can’t out-stare it down”.  One of many inspirations for King’s figures is photographs of Olympic divers because they convey powerful motion through space.

In 2019, Neka painted one of her first murals when Living Walls asked her to paint her “Peaceful Peach” mural on the parking garage at 76 Forsyth Street in Downtown Atlanta.  The large-scale installation was a combination of murals painted on the concrete surface of the garage and huge fabric panels with digital artwork complementing the painted murals.  The artist had this to say about the characters featured in this work: “…The large figures in the picture pay homage to Atlanta’s African American Community.  These figures act as peacekeepers watching over the city.”  This transition from digital art to mural art proved to be a smooth one and Neka has been painting murals ever since.  Another large-scale installation in collaboration with Living Walls was a gigantic manually painted canvas at the AT&T Perch at Mercedes-Benz stadium.  King saw this installation as an opportunity to show people who look like her “oh yeah, I could do that too.”

Neka received the 2018 Hughley Fellowship conducted by WonderRoot.  She was a featured artist for the multi-city touring 29Rooms art exhibit in 2019.  In 2020, King won the NABF Horizon award for Visual Arts.  She has also been a featured artist for Outerspace Project and Forward Warrior.

Link to Neka King’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nnekkaa_/

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