About the Artist
Chloe Kim is a student artist from Newton, Massachusetts, working across drawing, painting, and mixed media. Her practice begins with close attention to people: the structure of the body, the expressions we show and conceal, and the ways personal experience remains present in physical form.
The human figure appears throughout her work as both subject and language. Faces, hands, reflections, anatomical structures, and fragments of the body become ways to explore identity, memory, vulnerability, growth, and connection. Chloe is interested in the space between what can be observed and what must be imagined—the inner experiences that are difficult to express directly but can emerge through image, material, and perspective.
Her work is shaped by both studio investigation and engagement with others. Through humanitarian dental outreach and Youth Arts for Humanity, the youth-led nonprofit she founded and co-chairs, she has explored how art can create spaces for expression, comfort, participation, and care.
For Chloe, making art is a way of looking closely, asking difficult questions, and creating opportunities for people to feel seen.
Artist Statement
My work begins with people—how we grow, how we carry our experiences in our bodies, and how we find connection in moments of vulnerability. I am drawn to the human figure not only as a subject, but as a language: hands reaching, faces divided between skin and skull, bodies opening to reveal what lives inside. These images recur in my work because they express things I cannot say in any other way.
Much of what I make begins with something I have lived. Volunteering on dental mission trips to the Dominican Republic changed how I understand care—what it looks like from a patient’s chair, and what a small moment of attention can mean to someone who rarely receives it. Leading Youth Arts for Humanity showed me how art can create space for people to process experiences for which they may have no other outlet. These encounters gave my work a purpose beyond technique.
I am motivated by the desire to look more closely: at myself, at other people, and at moments that pass quickly but remain with us. I work across drawing, painting, and mixed media because different ideas demand different materials. Burned paper can carry something paint cannot. Newspaper rope extending from a canvas can communicate something a drawn line cannot. I am always asking what a material can hold, and whether it is enough to contain what I am trying to say.
Art as Practice and Connection
Chloe’s relationship with art extends beyond the individual artwork. Through Youth Arts for Humanity, she has developed workshops, exhibitions, and service projects that invite people to make, participate, and connect. Her Brushes Project, created in partnership with Dentists for Humanity, brings portable art activities to children and families during dental outreach in Paraguay, transforming waiting areas into spaces for creativity and comfort.
These experiences have shaped Chloe’s understanding of art as something that can be practiced with and for others. They have also expanded the questions at the center of her studio work:
How can an image invite empathy?
How can a material carry memory?
How can making something together change the way people experience a difficult moment?
Her work as an international outreach volunteer and photographer with Dentists for Humanity, alongside experience as a dental assistant and a STEM tutor, has sharpened the same habits her drawings rely on: close observation, patience, and care for the people in front of her. Art, for Chloe, is a practice of attention and a way of connecting.
Selected Experience
Chloe’s artistic and community-based experience includes Youth Arts for Humanity, humanitarian dental outreach, community art workshops, charity exhibitions, the Brushes Project in Paraguay, and interdisciplinary artistic training.