Petroglyphist

Kevin Sudeith is a contemporary artist best known for his large-scale petroglyph carvings, which he creates directly onto remote rock faces around the United States. His work blends ancient rock art traditions with modern imagery, often depicting things like satellites, drones, airplanes, and other symbols of contemporary life. Kevin is invested in community. He hopes to create permanent images that are representative of a culture’s values at the time of a carving, thus capturing “our moment.” He hopes that to those who find his work controversial, it also acts as a call to consider the every day destruction of nature. By returning to the very origin of human art, he hopes to find connection.

Sudeith travels extensively to find and carve in secluded, rural, or geologically significant locations. He often installs honor-system QR code stands at these sites, allowing passersby to view or purchase related artworks. He also creates studio pieces — including ceramic works and rubbings taken from the carvings — which he exhibits and sells. His art engages with ideas of permanence, communication across time, and the collision between ancient and modern storytelling. Recently, some of his work has also circulated on TikTok, where viewers react to the mystery and ambition of his carvings.

Kevin makes movable versions of the petroglyphs in the form of ceramics and prints which are now for sale. Kevin Sudeith’s ceramic practice is an extension of his petroglyph work. He creates ceramic pieces by making casts or impressions of his rock carvings, translating the monumental and site-specific nature of his petroglyphs into portable, tactile objects.

These ceramics often bear the same imagery as his carvings — satellites, fish, bicycles, helicopters, etc. — but rendered in low-relief and sometimes hand-painted or glazed. The process allows him to share the essence of his remote, time-intensive rock work in a format that can be exhibited in galleries or handled more intimately by viewers. In many cases, the ceramics are a way of documenting and archiving the carvings, but they also become standalone artworks that play with the themes of duplication, permanence, and storytelling. There’s something deeply archaeological about them — like future artifacts deliberately created for excavation.