Matthew Kirk, who is of Diné (Navajo) and European descent (b. 1978, Ganado, Arizona), is a New York-based artist known for his mixed-media work inspired by Diné motifs found in textiles as well as his urban environment. His three-dimensional constructions are replete with distinctive motifs configured on what the artist calls tiles. Kirk employs his own pictorial language of elemental signs—arrows suggesting moving and force, concentric circles and squares, and celestial, human and animal forms—to explore the intersection of his Indigenous and Euro-American heritage and position himself in respect to both. Kirk’s pictographic-like elements, each a miniature painting, are usually organized in a grid representing a mindscape drawn from his life experience.
In 2021, a large painting was on view at NADA House on Governors Island in New York Harbor, in an exhibition organized by the New Art Dealers Alliance and singled out by Roberta Smith in her review of the show in The New York Times. In 2022, two large works, one twenty-two-feet long, were prominently hung in the lobby of Meta’s Midtown Manhattan office in the historic James A. Farley Building and his work was included in Outcropping: Indigenous Art Now at the Southampton Arts Center, New York. In 2023 Kirk’s work was on view in the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, New York, in Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination Since 1969 and in the The House Edge, an exhibition addressing Indigenous sovereignty at The 8th Floor, New York, presented by the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation. In 2024 his work was included in Hudson Valley Artists 2024: Bibliography at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, State University of New York, New Paltz; and on view in the Brooklyn Museum in The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition. Kirk has commissioned work on view at the Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw State University, Georgia, through July 2025.
Kirk was a 2019 recipient of the Eiteljorg Museum Fellowship for Contemporary Native American Art. His work is in the Forge Project collection in Taghkanic, New York; the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York; and the Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, among others.