Project Overview

Coordinates | Cook Convention Center

“The tapestry depicts an airplane flying overhead, symbolizing the center’s international audiences.”

Kim Beck's Coordinates of 2001 is a knotted tapestry hung on the wall of the Cook Convention Center. The tapestry depicts an airplane flying overhead, symbolizing the center’s international audiences. The strong lines of the utility pole and lines create a dynamic rhythm leading the viewers eye to the plane, creating a connection between those looking up from the ground and down from the plane. This monumental work hangs to the left of the stairwell to the second floor in the West Concourse of the Cook Convention Center. Coordinates was initially exhibited as a floor piece. It was acquired for the Cook Convention Center through the fundraising efforts of the Greater Memphis Arts Council in 2003.

About the Artist

Kim Beck

Using images of architecture and landscape, Kim Beck makes drawings, paintings, prints, photographs, books, cutout sculptures, and installations that survey peripheral and suburban spaces. Electrical transformers, cell towers, and billboards grow like invasive species. And invasive species, such as dandelions, pop up in photographs of lawns and installations using vinyl decals, stuck directly to walls and windows. These create mutated landscapes, alien-but-familiar spaces in a continuous state of flux. Her work urges a reconsideration of the built environment - the peculiar street signs, gas station banners, overgrown weeded lots, and self-storage buildings — bringing the banal and everyday into focus.

Kim Beck grew up in Colorado and lives in Pittsburgh, PA, where she is an Associate Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon. Her work sits at the intersection of drawing, print, photography, sculpture, and installation. It has been shown on the High Line in New York City, at the Walker Art Center, Carnegie Museum of Art, Smack Mellon, Socrates Sculpture Park, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, the Warhol Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art and in Buffalo, 100 Acres at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and on billboards on I70 between Kansas City and St. Louis. She has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Art Omi, Yaddo, Bemis Center for the Arts, Montalvo Arts Center, Helsinki Artists Program, Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts in China, Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program, International Studio & Curatorial Program, Cité Internationale des Arts, Vermont Studio Center and VCCA and has received awards from Ars Electronica, Pollock-Krasner, Heinz Foundation, Thomas J. Watson Foundation and Printed Matter. Beck has an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and BA from Brandeis University.