“We have to stop letting all dogs into Heaven—people are getting mauled.”Cartoon by Zachary KaninCopy link to cartoonCopy link to cartoonLink copiedShopShopIn nearly every drawing, Cole could point to a motif and explain its real-world referent. The Fanta mascot peers out from a pantry door—the same pantry door that was in the house in Auckland where the Kings moved in 1960. An interplay of right-angled lines is a handrail in the yard of the I.H.C. School, the center for disabled children where King was enrolled at age nine. Some of the pictures pose questions. What if you had a face on the sole of your foot? A faucet growing out of your forehead? Others are testing grounds for activities that the real world forbids. King drops elephants through the air, erects wobbly Towers of Babel, lets characters run amok with depictions of her own pencils, and then summons a hand with a knife to clear a clean space on the page.The drawings survive because of the family’s archiving instinct, but that instinct sometimes resulted in mutilation: many have been folded, cut up, and pasted into scrapbooks. One day, Cole paged through an album whose acidic glues caused her particular anguish. “I call those birdified people, or peoplefied birds,” she said, of a few fragments. I admired a troll with toothpicks for a beard who looked as if he were made of caviar. “Look how cronky this guy is!” she said, pointing to a clown from Hell. “And a big floppy penis in the middle of it.”I had seen King’s work in person once before, at the 2022 Outsider Art Fair in New York. Her drawings hung beside pieces by Henry Darger, Bill Traylor, and James Castle—canonical artists in the genre. “Outsider art” is the English equivalent of “art brut,” a term coined in the nineteen-forties by the French artist Jean Dubuffet, to describe the works of children, prisoners, and psychiatric patients. Dubuffet had grown disenchanted by what he called the “fallacious parade” of highbrow art; in the unschooled, the ostracized, and the vulnerable, he found a more authentic spirit. Eighty years later, the mainstream art world has assimilated “outsider art” as a marketing category. It has become a shorthand for artists who are self-taught or who exist outside the usual cultural byways, but the term is not otherwise descriptive. The curator Lyle Rexer, who has written on the genre’s vexations, points out that most art-world isms—Cubism, Impressionism—were created by artists to describe their working principles. “Outsider art,” on the other hand, refers not “to the art but to the status of those who make it.” The works of Darger, Traylor, Castle, and King have little to do with one another except that their makers were marginal, and even the conditions of their marginality vary: Darger was institutionalized as a child, made unusual noises and gestures, and lived his later years as a recluse; Traylor was born into slavery; Castle was the profoundly deaf child of subsistence farmers.Petita Cole has spent two decades archiving her sister’s vast body of work, along with many of the real-life objects she has drawn.Photograph by Jake Mein for The New YorkerOutsider art thus sustains a frustrating paradox. It ventures to include while also fencing out. It seems to marvel that great art could come from somewhere beyond common experience, when the most pervasive cliché of the art establishment is that the artist is a nonconformist. The term suggests supernatural gifts despite formal ignorance. King’s mastery, in fact, comes from years of intense, self-directed study, even if much of the study has developed on envelopes, bits of cardboard, and other scraps. “It’s mind-blowing how serious her drawings are, and mind-blowing how unserious her materials are,” the New York gallerist Phillip March Jones, who represents King in the United States, told me. (A solo show of her work, curated by Jones, is now on view in Los Angeles, at James Fuentes Gallery.)King’s indifference to orthodox formats enables formal mischief. The drawings are often double-sided, with no discernible up or down. She searches for imperfections in the paper and allows them to influence her line. Sometimes, when drawing in a notebook, she bears down with so much pressure that she inscribes the page beneath. She’ll turn the page and let the grooves prompt the next picture. Paper is a joke with many punch lines. I came across a small scrap that she had reinterpreted as a jail cell. Bugs Bunny jams himself against the edge and grits his teeth in agony. Another scrap pulls off a different gag: King had filled it with a tiny but proportional composition, as if she’d shrunk down a large drawing for a doll-house wall. In one work, a trompe-l’oeil page corner lifts to reveal a world beyond. “You feel like you’re seeing something unfold in real time,” the gallerist Robert Heald, who represents King in New Zealand, said. “Works spill into other works. Any one work is a sample of the larger thing. You’re just dipping in and out.”King attended the I.H.C. School until she was twenty-nine years old. Initially, it was a good place for her. Her teachers enjoyed her drawings and left her alone to make them. There were psychiatrists on staff, but none remained at the school long enough to get to know King or offer an answer for why she didn’t speak. In 1965, when King was fourteen, one psychiatrist recommended a stay in Ward 10, the inpatient psychiatric floor at Auckland City Hospital, so that doctors could get to the bottom of it.One of King’s sketchbooks from the nineteen-sixties. “It’s mind-blowing how serious her drawings are, and mind-blowing how unserious her materials are,” another gallerist, Phillip March Jones, says.Art work courtesy the artist; Photograph by Jake Mein for The New YorkerSome weeks later, when Dawn visited King in the ward, she found her daughter sitting outdoors in the sunshine. The weather was hot, but King was dressed in several wool sweaters, sweating profusely. It appeared that she had not been bathed. Dawn learned that the staff had withdrawn all personal care as part of King’s treatment plan. They theorized that King could talk but was simply refusing to do so. If they stopped assisting her, the reasoning went, she would have to articulate her preferences. Thus began a game of attrition. King didn’t ask to bathe, so they did not bathe her. She did not say what foods she wanted, so they did not feed her. She did not tell them when she was menstruating, so they let her bleed through her clothes. Because drawing was another form of communication, they took her materials away.When Cole described this episode to me, sixty years later, she spoke with fresh bitterness. “They thought, If she wants something, she can bloody well ask,” she said. Cole rummaged through an archival box and pulled out a notebook that was no bigger than a business card. Murphy had smuggled it into the ward for King, who had filled each page with a miniature composition: an emaciated bird, a demonic Donald Duck leering from bed, a reclining male torso with an erection. Later, Murphy secreted it home.King went back and forth to Ward 10 several times, and these institutionalizations marked the beginning of a dark period for the family. In 1970, the fourth King sibling, Irene, died of leukemia, at sixteen years old. Ten years later, their brother Bernard, a gentle, soft-spoken botanist, developed schizophrenia, and their mother became consumed with coördinating his care. By this time, the I.H.C. had introduced a work program in which students performed repetitive tasks for a few cents an hour. King was no longer allowed to draw; instead, she spent her days hooking rugs. The wool fibres irritated her eyes. When she drew at home, the repetitive motions of the rug workshop carried into her pictures. She filled pages with tight, agitated coils. By the mid-nineties, she’d left the I.H.C., and stopped drawing completely. She spent much of her time in the living room, expressionless, “like a shadow,” Cole said. The family packed King’s drawings in boxes and suitcases, which they stowed in closets and in a crawlspace under the house.One day, during my visit, Cole used a step stool to access a small cubbyhole in a high corner of a bedroom wall—a sort of illogical nook that seemed preordained to house some private, upsetting object. She excavated several journals the size of phone books. “Mum’s repertoire-izing,” she said. Dawn had had a lifelong interest in homeopathy and spent hours obsessively detailing her children’s ailments. She covered every inch of every page with her tight script, then covered the pages with Post-it notes, illuminating the illuminations:What’s it all about SUSAN Looks Sadeyes puffing underSO What’s it all about?In 2008, a friend of the King family, the filmmaker Dan Salmon, began making a feature-length documentary about King called “Pictures of Susan.” Salmon wondered if King could be persuaded to draw again, and Dawn agreed to try. She set out paper and pencils on a worktable by some windows that overlooked the bush. Aware that King did not tolerate disorder, she left little messes around the materials—a dish towel draped over a chair, for example. The hope was that King would pause to tidy up the area, then pick up a pencil. When that didn’t work, Dawn stencilled shapes onto white paper. Maybe King would want to fill them in.For a long time, nothing happened. But then, in Dawn’s journal:June 08Susan STARTS TO DRAW again“It wasn’t incy-wincy,” Cole said. “It was boom.” The new drawings weren’t representational like the old ones; they were abstract and weblike, even cartographic. Just as before, King made them in great numbers.Meanwhile, Cole had been pulling old drawings out of suitcases to remind King of what she used to do. Once the drawings were out of storage, it seemed wrong to put them back. More sensible, Cole thought, to file them in plastic sleeves. None of the pieces had titles, so she assigned them numbers and instituted a system. As she organized the works, she noticed patterns. Characters—both known and invented—had recurrent cameos.At the house, Cole sat at her office computer and read some of the categories in a database that she’d designed. “I need to make sure the information is user-friendly so that if I’m hit by a bus or whatever it’s not all lost,” she said. We skimmed part of the list together: CRUTCHES, CONCRETE MIXERS, HAT PINS, GROIN CLUTCHER, HINGED EYEBALL, Indication of PAIN or INJURY, ICEBERGS and IGLOOS, HAIRY CHIN, CALIPERS, COLLAPSED GELATO, FEET or HEAD in PAPER BAG, FEMALE NUDE, FOGHORN LEGHORN, EARTH MOVING MACHINE. There were certain objects in the drawings which only family members would recognize. Cole had noticed the legs of their dining table and the Bakelite switches in Murphy’s house. She remembered a ceramic turtle that had sat on a shelf. In the fifties, its head broke off—a notable event. And there, in one of King’s drawings, was the same turtle, with its head missing.Doug died in 1998, Dawn in 2018. As Cole packed up her parents’ home, she uncovered more of the objects King had drawn. “Come, I’ll show you my bitty bits,” Cole said. She led me to the living room, where there were several cabinets of clutter. Her collection includes a leather worker’s rotating hole punch, a wishbone, bedroom slippers with pompom toes, Murphy’s silver teaspoons in the various shapes of the twelve apostles, an old-fashioned rubber enema, a portable FM radio that looks like the Bassett’s Liquorice Allsorts mascot, a frilly white bathing cap, a cereal-box prize from the sixties called the Flex-O-Link. Virtually any object with a connection to King’s past was worth keeping. She showed me a photo of Eileen Joynt, a neighbor who knew King as a child, and a dish of small, beige minerals, which Cole gathered and placed in my hand. “Eileen Joynt’s gallstones,” she said.Not everything that King draws is identifiable. For years, Cole was mystified by a small, beanlike object with stripes which lurked in the background of certain drawings. The bean didn’t resemble anything obvious, but seemed important; King drew it frequently. Cole made a bean from polymer clay, sanded it smooth, and applied stripes with a pencil. She went through the archive and found every instance of the bean, then made each one a precise clay double. In time, she had seventeen. She gave the beans to King, who rolled them around in her palm.Cole’s archive is always growing, especially now that King has got her second wind. KAWS likes to send gifts in the mail—limited-edition figurines, an art book, and, recently, a Christmas card, which King improved with meandering lines. When I visited Auckland, Cole was preparing for a show in New York, at Ruttkowski;68, which would pair King’s drawings with works by the German artist Philip Emde. Emde paints portraits of stuffed animals made by the German company Steiff. Cole went online, bought Steiffs by the piles, and lined the shelves of King’s bedroom. That was her way of putting the artists in conversation.Back in 2009, when King’s gallerists first talked about selling her work, most of the King siblings rejected the idea. No one could know for certain what King wanted, and the siblings didn’t feel that it was within their authority to decide, so the family took a cautious approach. The work showed in Sydney and in Wellington, but none of the drawings were offered for purchase. Not selling was also a choice with consequences, though. Cole recalled how, at the close of those early shows, the drawings were removed from their frames and returned to Auckland, to be put back in their cupboards. “Does that really honor them?” she asked. The family’s stance shifted. In 2013, the curator Chris Byrne and Marquand Books presented King’s work at the Outsider Art Fair in Paris, and all the drawings on view sold.King at the Auckland Zoo, which she visits frequently. “Reptiles and her own exhibitions,” Cole says. “The two guarantees.”Photograph by Jake Mein for The New YorkerThe last time that King had earned money for art was in 1973, when the International Society for Mentally Handicapped Children included two of her drawings in a charity exhibition. The pieces sold for three pounds. Now she was receiving checks for thousands of dollars. The family did not know where to put the money, or how it should be taxed. They consulted an accountant, who told them that King needed a court-appointed property manager; this required a doctor to confirm her disability. King saw a psychiatrist, and at the age of sixty-four was given a diagnosis of autism-spectrum disorder.Cole sees the diagnosis as merely clerical. King was the same person before and after, even if her behaviors became less mysterious. The important consequence was that she could keep her money in a trust. Money from sales meant better materials and the chance to travel, and it allowed Cole to quit her job as an elementary-school art teacher to manage King’s studio. Cole did worry that curators might overemphasize the diagnosis, that King would no longer be an artist but an autistic artist, and therefore a symbol of something—resilience, perhaps, or liberation through creativity. King’s gallerists maintain that her work should be considered on its own terms. “King’s neurodiversity is the least interesting thing about her,” Jones, the New York gallerist, said. Cole told me that once, when King’s work was included in a group show whose only common theme was disability, King had acted visibly miffed.Three months after my visit to Auckland, Cole and King travelled to New York City for the show with Emde, which was called “Playdate.” A day ahead of the opening, Cole arranged for Emde and King to spend some time together. They decided to visit the Bronx Zoo, and I drove the three of them there.The zoo was deserted in a late-summer heat wave. Emde wandered ahead while King lagged behind at her usual tempo, which is uncommonly slow but projects incongruous urgency. They saw an Andean condor, its wings spread wide as a canoe. The gorillas lazed in their pen like picnickers on a lawn. One paced at the edge of the enclosure, and then, in a swift, warlike motion, hurled a clod of dirt toward the glass, where it exploded with a bang. The onlookers shrieked and leaped back. King did not flinch.At the opening reception for “Playdate,” King spent a long time in front of Emde’s largest work, scanning it as if committing it to memory. Cole hovered nearby. Some visitors wanted to speak to King but weren’t sure how. A few whispered close to her ear, others talked loudly at a distance. Some addressed Cole as if King weren’t there. The best way to talk to King, I had decided, was to look at her drawings with her and describe what you see. I noticed that whenever I did this my sentences would steadily simplify, becoming recitations of nouns, then syllables, then noises. Eventually, I’d go silent, and we’d just look together.At 8 P.M., the gallery was still full. Though King wore no watch, some inner clock told her that the show was over. She stood by the entrance and waited. That was fine, the stance seemed to say, those strangers and their talking. But now it was time for something else. Cole opened the door, and King pressed into a graffitied alley, smiling at walls defaced with names, emblems, and old, ecstatic gestures. ?