Born in 1951 in Pomona, California, Kim Dingle lives and works in Los Angeles. She spent her teens in Las Vegas where she began her 9-year career managing trade bookstores, which ultimately led her back to California. She left corporate retail management to take up house painting on an all-female crew while attending California State University, Los Angeles at age 27. To escape the drudgery of house painting, she applied to the Claremont Graduate School where she earned a Master of Fine Arts (1990). Dingle, having her first mainstream gallery show in Los Angeles on her 40th birthday, inspired Peter Schjeldahl to tag her a “late bloomer.” Early solo exhibitions of her work were presented at institutions including California State University, Los Angeles (1991); Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles (1995-96); and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (1996). Dingle was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial, and her work appeared in the group exhibition “Sunshine and Noir: Art in L. A., 1960-1997,” at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (1997), which traveled to major institutions in Europe and the United States. Mid-career, Dingle, with partner Aude Charles, for no particular reason, opened and personally ran Fatty’s & Co., a full-service fine dining vegetarian restaurant in the middle of Dingle’s studio in Los Angeles. Though the artist has described the 13 year-long experience as a nightmare, she also considers it an enormous inspiration for her paintings. Following the sale of the restaurant, she opened “Wine Bar for Children” at Coagula Curatorial, Los Angeles (2013-14) (and was never arrested). Recently, her work was included in “Women Painting Women” at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2022). Among public collections owning her work are the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Seattle Museum of Contemporary Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Dingle had her first solo show at Sperone Westwater in 1998 and subsequent exhibitions in 2000, 2007, 2012, 2018, and 2023.

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