Matthew Kirk was born in Ganado, Arizona, in 1978 and grew up in Wisconsin. In 2006, he moved to Queens, New York, where he lives and works today. He is a self-taught artist, best known for his mixed-media work inspired by his urban environment as well as Diné (Navajo) motifs found in textiles. He is best known for his dimensional paintings comprising distinctive motifs configured on what the artist calls “tiles.” His most recent paintings on Sheetrock panels tend toward greater abstraction. In both, Kirk employs his own pictorial language of elemental signs—arrows suggesting movement and force, concentric circles, and celestial, human and animal forms—to explore the intersection of his Indigenous and Euro-American heritage and position himself in relation to both.
Kirk has exhibited his work widely. 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 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 at New Paltz, and on view in the Brooklyn Museum in The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition. In 2025, his work was included in the Hudson River Museum’s Smoke in Our Hair: Native Memory and Unsettled Time, and a commissioned work by Kirk was on view at the Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw State University, Georgia.
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.
