Jane Kim

Jane Kim (born 1981) is an American painter, science illustrator and the founder of the Ink Dwell studio. She is best known for her large-scale murals, created with the purpose of promoting advocacy of the natural world.

Biography

Jane Kim was born in 1981, and raised in Mount Prospect, Illinois. Kim studied at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and received her B.F.A. in printmaking in 2003. She moved to San Francisco the same year of her graduation in 2003, living initially in the Tenderloin neighborhood.

In 2012, Kim started the process of creating the Migrating Mural, a series of six murals featuring Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep. The murals span 120 miles of California’s Highway 395. Fundraising for the project took place on the crowd funding platform, Kickstarter.

Kim was a featured artist in the Facebook Artist Residency program. Her work is located in a Facebook campus stairwell featuring graphic portraits of local, native birds and a second mural with illustrations of the local Facebook campus foxes.

In 2015, Kim completed a 70-foot by 40-foot mural called the Wall of Birds at Cornell University's Lab of Ornithology. The mural depicts 243 modern bird families, all life size and superimposed on a map of the earth.

In 2017, Kim painted the Flora From Fauna series of six murals around Redwood City, California to commemorate a lost industry of the 1920s when Japanese immigrants were growing and exporting chrysanthemums from the city. Unfortunately much of the chrysanthemum industry was lost during World War II and the internment of Japanese-Americans. In 2023, she was interviewed by Half Moon Bay Review where she highlighted that she has been focusing on making her art pieces more nature-oriented and further stating, "Nature has always been my muse, but in art school I was discouraged from doing this kind of work." Migrating Mural (2018), featuring images of monarch butterflies on plants, Full Sail University, Winter Park, Florida Migrating Mural (2018), featuring monarch butterflies in three murals, Ogden Nature Center, Ogden, Utah Migrating Mural (2019), featuring monarch butterflies in multiple murals, San Francisco, California