Kim Miller

Kim Miller

Kim Miller (born 1988) is an American artist who was diagnosed with "classic" autism in 1991. She began creating artwork at the age of 3 1/2 years old before she could functionally speak. At first, her artwork was just the outward articulation of an aloof, introverted, seemingly expressionless autistic child. After several years of utilizing sign language, delayed echolalia (the echoing of words and phrases), coupled with speech therapy, she learned to speak verbally as detailed in the book The Girl Who Spoke With Pictures, which describes her advancement as a person with autism. Although Miller learned how to verbalize, she found it frustrating, difficult and time-consuming to communicate with words in real time. Drawing became a short cut to show her thoughts, feelings and needs. Miller is often referred to as an "outside artist," outsider art self-taught and self-motivated. She is prolific in various mediums; acrylic paint, sculpting, ceramics, pencil as well as pen and ink. She is able to paint in a variety of styles exploring techniques such as pointillism, German Expressionism, or her own three-dimensional style; shifting from one painting to another as though simply changing fonts on the computer. Although some of the symptoms of autism (relating to objects rather than people, the fear of looking people in their faces, the inability to understand/process emotions) pose challenges, her unique work is outstanding for the fact that she chooses these very issues to examine and explore the complex human experience and relationships through her art.

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