“What can I do to change the color blue?”
—Byron Kim


This website re-presents Byron Kim’s Sunday Paintings, the ongoing series the artist initiated in January 2001. Every week, Kim produces a small, square painting of the sky at that time, and inscribes a journal entry on the completed painting. The journal entries — often meditations on painting, teaching, parenting, love, friendship, and current events — are marked with the time, date, and location of each painting. As the weather changes, we see Kim move between his art studio in Brooklyn and his parents’ home in San Diego; from the summer school he co-directs with Lisa Sigal in Norfolk, CT to his art- and family-related travels around the world. While some Sunday Paintings are occasionally a day or three late, Kim has only missed a few weeks since 2001. The series is now well over 1,000 paintings, and continues to steadily grow.

Readers will note that as they scroll into the past the entries get less and less frequent. The Sunday Paintings from the first few years were often sold or given away before they were properly documented, or, if they were documented, their photographs have since been lost. From 2015–20, the artist Yoonjung Choi began the maintenance of photographing, transcribing, and indexing Kim’s Sunday Paintings. Without her dedicated work, this publication would not have been possible.

If you own or have photos of a Sunday Painting that is not shown in this database, or if you have written about Kim’s Sunday Paintings and would like your writing to be included in the bibliography, please write to byronkimstudio@gmail.com

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Byron Kim, Sunday Paintings, 2001–present. Acrylic and pencil or pen on canvas, mounted on panel; 14 × 14 inches.

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Published by Screen Door, Brooklyn, 2022.

Edited by Byron Kim and Bryce Wilner.

Website designed by Bryce Wilner and Matt Wolff.
Typeset in Byron Kim Scripts 1–5.

With some individual exceptions, all artworks photographed by Byron Kim, Yoonjung Choi, Bryce Wilner, Katherine Du Tiel (for SFMOMA), James Cohan Gallery, Kukje Gallery, or Max Protetch Gallery.

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Epigraph:

Byron Kim, “The Local Color of Shadow,” Threshold: Byron Kim, 1990–2004, ed. Eugenie Tsai (University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2004), p. 44.