Susan, silently

Untrained and unable to speak, Susan Te Kahurangi King is one of our greatest artists, most often compared to Picasso.

- STEVE BRAUNIAS

There’s a thrilling moment in a Manhattan art gallery captured in a six-minute video on YouTube when Jerry Saltz, Pulitzer Prizewinning art critic for New York magazine, declares that New Zealand artist Susan Te Kahurangi King (Ngāti Hauā) is a genius, and announces in a quite loud and very confident voice: “You don't need her backstory. That's a fallacy.”

He is at once absolutely correct and completely wrong. He means the work – in particular her fantastical, intensely detailed, deeply moving figurative drawings in pencil and ballpoint pen, made when King was a teenager and in her 20s, closed off from the world in an IHC sheltered workshop on Auckland's North Shore, mute since she was 4 years old growing up in Te Aroha – needs only to be looked at, no biographical information necessary. True, the work is amazing. King’s art is exhibited across the US (New York, Miami, Philadelphia) and Europe (Paris, Düsseldorf). She is one of only three New Zealand artists held at MoMA (the Museum of Modern Art) in New York.

Te Papa acquired six of her drawings, currently on display in Wellington; she is also part of a group show at Robert Heald Gallery, also in Wellington, and other works are about to be exhibited at a show in Lexington, Kentucky. All of it, like nothing anyone has ever seen, so original and bewildering that the artist she is most likened to is Picasso.

But to think only of the work is to perform the act that has afflicted or shaped her whole life – of ignoring her. King has an autism spectrum disorder. She was born in 1951. She was a chatty little girl, the second eldest of 12 in a very Christian household, but stopped talking at about 4, her grandmother and fierce advocate Myrtle recording every overheard word (“tiki”, “Māori doll”) in the years that followed. One of the last things she said was after a funeral. She came home and said, “Dead. Dead. Dead.”