Novella King is a New Mexico painter best known for her decades of landscape, adobe, and floral paintings concentrated on the working country of Placitas, Corrales, and the broader Albuquerque region, a sustained representational practice rooted in the mid-twentieth-century Albuquerque art scene she helped to build.
Novella King (born 1927) is an American painter associated for many years with the Albuquerque, New Mexico, art community. She studied under Carl Von Hassler, the German-born Albuquerque painter who was a central teacher of the city's mid-century art scene, and developed a representational practice rooted in the New Mexican landscape, adobe architecture, and floral subject matter of the country surrounding the city.
She and several other women painters of her generation, including Betty Sabo and Carol McElroy, opened a gallery in Albuquerque's Old Town in the 1960s as a venue for their own work, one of the earliest cooperative women's gallery efforts in the postwar New Mexican art scene. Her paintings concentrate on the small towns and landscapes of the upper Rio Grande and the Sandia foothills, Placitas, Corrales, and the working farmland and adobe villages around Albuquerque, and have continued to circulate through galleries in Albuquerque and Santa Fe.