Kevin Walker was born in Paris and raised in East Africa — a biography that has always positioned him slightly outside the assumptions of any given culture. He began his formal art studies at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, and completed his MFA at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles in 1978, where his work was shown at the Los Angeles Institute for Contemporary Art and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.

Then he walked away.

Walker emerged from his graduate training deeply skeptical of the art world's tendency to absorb and neutralize original thought. Rather than compromise his emerging artistic perspective by participating prematurely, he withdrew for more than three decades — sustaining his creative intelligence through music and graphic design while continuing to observe, think, and question. The distance gave him something most artists never acquire: immunity from influence.

His practice now encompasses painting, installation, public intervention, and conceptual projects unified by a single inquiry — the act of seeing itself. Walker works in a tradition for which perception is the medium and the viewer's experience is the work. What distinguishes him is the particular stubbornness of his arrival: unmediated by market pressures and institutional feedback loops, his engagement with these ideas is entirely his own.

A founding collaborator of Musée du Al, Walker has served as its Executive Director since its inaugural exhibition in 2025. He lives and works in Los Angeles.