MK Guth
American artist
MK Guth (born 1963) is an installation artist from Portland, Oregon, United States, whose work engages ritual and site of social interaction. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at museums, galleries, and festivals including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Swiss Institute, White Columns, and the Melbourne International Arts Festival among others. She is the recipient of the Betty Bowen Special Recognition Award and the Ford Family Foundation Fellowship.
Career
Guth was educated at University of Madison, Wisconsin, graduating in sociology. She obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree at New York University.
She first came to international attention for her work at the Whitney Biennial in 2008, which the New York Times described as "sweet, New Agey expansiveness that is atypical for this year's hermetic, uningratiating show". Her installation, entitled "Ties of Protection and Safe Keeping" asked visitors to record what was most dear to them on scraps of cloth, which were then woven into the sculpture. The work was based loosely on the tale of Rapunzel. It expanded in size three-fold during the event, eventually totalling 500 feet.
During a 20-day residency at the Cosmopolitan P3 Studio, Las Vegas in 2011, Guth created a similar work of braided art (the third and final in her braided series) that stretched for 200 feet covering two rooms.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 19, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q16224862. VIAF identifies the subject as 96637847. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1963, 2008 and 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “MK Guth” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.