William Wind McKim

William Wind McKim was born in Independence, Missouri, and attended the Kansas City Art Institute to study painting in 1934. At the Art Institute he studied with Thomas Hart Benton, Wallace Rosenbauer and John De Martelly. He was awarded several scholarships during his undergraduate days and exhibited his work nationwide. He gained early acclaim after exhibiting in the New York World's Fair Exhibit of Contemporary Art in 1939 when he was only twenty-three years old. This resulted in a listing in Who’s Who in American Art in that same year. He finished his undergraduate degree in painting at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1940.

McKim served in the U.S. Army during World War II and taught visual communication in the Signal Corps. He traveled extensively in the Army and earned the rank of second lieutenant. His Army travels took him primarily to the South Pacific. He returned to Kansas City after his service and resumed his work as an artist.

To study animal anatomy, McKim became an apprentice to J. F. Frazer, an experienced taxidermist. McKim worked extensively in naturalistic drawings and lithographs of animals, and his close study of them shows in his meticulously drawn prints.

McKim was invited to join the staff at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1945. This resulted in the revitalization of the lithography department at the college. McKim was primarily self-taught as a printmaker and lithographer but professionally educated in drawing and painting. He wrote a manual on lithographic printmaking, Printing from Stone, and also wrote several articles in the Kansas City Star on lithography, including one that mentioned the exhibit from the Tamarind Workshop (based in California) that was held at the Nelson Gallery in 1964. 

McKim judged art exhibitions as well as field trials for dogs. His own dogs competed and won awards in bird dog and field trial competitions in the 1950s and 1960s. McKim’s subject matter was nature, and he noted in a 1963 article in the Kansas City Star that his “reason for wanting to draw was to capture the form and spirit of outdoor subjects” (Kansas City Star, January 22, 1963). His love of nature and his love of art were intertwined from a young age.

William McKim exhibited widely, including in the Missouri Pavilion at the New York World's Fair in 1964 and many solo exhibitions at regional galleries. He designed the background for the Missouri mammals exhibit at the Kansas City Museum (late 1950s/early 1960s) and spent time sketching in Jackson Hole, Wyoming; Saskatchewan and Manitoba, Canada; the eastern United States; and Mexico and Europe. McKim was interested in biology and anthropology and also contributed to American Field, the official magazine of the bird dog world, and served as president of the Heart of America Field Trial Association.

He served on the faculty at the Kansas City Art Institute until his retirement in 1986. He died in 1995 in Kansas City.