King belongs to the postwar generation of New Mexican women painters who learned their craft from the established teachers of the local mid-century scene and carried that representational tradition forward through the second half of the twentieth century, a generation whose work remains closely tied to the particular landscape, light, and architecture of the Rio Grande valley.
King's path into painting ran through one of the most distinctive figures of mid-century Albuquerque art. Carl Von Hassler had emigrated from Germany earlier in the century and had become one of the central painters and teachers of New Mexican landscape and architecture; his Albuquerque studio served as the working training ground for a generation of younger New Mexican painters who would build the postwar Albuquerque art scene. King's apprenticeship under him gave her the technical foundation and the specific set of subjects, adobes, courtyards, the Rio Grande villages, the desert light, that her own subsequent work would extend.
Her decision to open a gallery in Albuquerque's Old Town with several other women painters of her generation placed her at the centre of the local effort to build exhibition infrastructure for postwar New Mexican women artists. The Old Town location, the historic colonial heart of the city, with its small adobe shops and church plaza, gave the cooperative a permanent presence within the city's working tourist and collector economy, and the gallery operated as a working venue for the painters' own production through the 1960s and beyond.
Her own painting concentrated on the country around Albuquerque. Placitas, the village in the Sandia foothills north of the city, and Corrales, the long agricultural village along the Rio Grande, became her primary subjects, and her landscapes captured the particular quality of New Mexican light, the geometry of the adobe architecture, and the seasonal rhythm of the working farmland. The floral and landscape paintings she produced in parallel extended that observational base into more intimate subjects.
Her work has been collected steadily through Albuquerque and Santa Fe galleries across her long working life and continues to be associated with the broader tradition of representational New Mexican landscape painting that runs from the early Taos Society through the postwar Albuquerque artists of her own generation and beyond.