Ariel Klein is an emerging artist whose paintings combine inventive abstract and figurative images with whimsical graffiti. His portfolio includes portraits, murals, and projects across genres and in collaboration with other artists. A graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art (BFA 2012), Klein also studied at the School of Fine Arts of the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Klein worked as a set painter for GALA Hispanic Theater in Washington and as a maxillofacial reconstruction artist at the Bronx Veteran’s Hospital and Columbia, where he crafted hyper-realistic facial prostheses. He also was among a team of artists that transformed the plywood covered storefronts in his Inwood, New York neighborhood into giant murals following the death of George Floyd. Those boards became the subject of an exhibit in North Adams, Massachusetts, where he moved in 2020.

Klein’s work appears on album covers, on skateboards and in the private collections of renown rap artists El Trainn, Ola Runt and Trill CG, whose portraits he painted. Paintings in “The President’s Own” United States Marine Band series were done during a year-long artist-in-residence program at Stathmore, a popular performance venue. Some of those works hang in the Marine Barracks in Washington.