While walking through the hallways, you may see an unfamiliar face near the art rooms. Taking the place of 3-D art teacher Ms. Stephanie Kantor, who is on parental leave, Mr. Arthur King now lends his expertise to students in the classroom after years of working in a variety of different mediums and businesses.
Mr. King attended the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, where he majored in sculpture and object design.
“I mostly focused on fine arts and making large objects,” Mr. King said. “I liked to work with solid materials like metal, concrete, and wood.”
As he left university, he started a non-profit organization that would create art-focused youth programming.
“[The nonprofit] focused on art and being creative. Also, alternative activities like skateboarding, mountain biking, and BMXing were introduced to kids,” Mr. King said. “We built skate parks all over the world.”
While working with the nonprofit, Mr. King realized that he needed to work to make money and support himself.
“Nonprofit work is very rewarding, but also did not pay very well,” Mr. King said. “Nobody was buying sculptures because they are functionless objects, so I had to take the skillsets I had developed from my sculptural experience and apply them to something that would pay the bills and feed a family.”
He began to design furniture and other functional objects. In addition, Mr. King began to work with developers to flip houses in Los Angeles.
“These developers wanted original designs,” Mr. King said, “and that is when I got into architectural design. I [was] mentored under an architect for a while and went off on my own to make my own architectural firm.”
Some of the architecture that Mr. King worked on has been for large tech companies.
“Some of my favorite projects are for tech offices.”
Mr. Arthur King
“Some of my favorite projects are for tech offices,” Mr. King said. “Any time you have a client like a tech company that likes to push the envelope, they tend to like the more sculptural art pieces.”
He has worked on the headquarters of many media companies like Giffy, Wave Media, and Collab Creators. Mr. King has also done some work with big names, like P Diddy and Raheem Sterling.
“I lived and worked for a long time in Los Angeles, almost a decade, and being in LA and doing a lot of high-end design work allowed me to interact with celebrities with big budgets,” Mr. King said. “They like to do really interesting pieces, and I was able to do some really fun architectural design.”
Mr. King is continuing to design buildings for high-profile people and is even working on some of The Revolt’s (a music-oriented production company owned by P Diddy) offices and their newsroom.
“There is one downside to working with these contracts is that there is a lot of red tape,” Mr. King said. “There are a lot of people to please, and you need to be at the top of your game. You need to listen to a lot of people and combine all these ideas into original and functional design work.”
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