Today we’d like to introduce you to Kristen King.
Hi Kristen, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
My journey as an artist has been anything but linear. In many ways, Worthwhile Baggage was born from learning how to make something beautiful out of what life leaves behind.
I am a self-taught multidisciplinary artist and designer from Washington, DC. I began creating around 2020, initially without any grand plan of becoming a professional artist. Creating became a language for me, a way to process life, preserve memories, and give new meaning to things that might otherwise be discarded or forgotten. Over time, that instinct evolved into Worthwhile Baggage, a wearable art practice rooted in the idea that what we carry shapes who we become.
That philosophy is both literal and deeply personal. I create functional art using unexpected and often repurposed materials: cigar boxes, cassette tapes, vinyl records, sheet music, florals, beads, vintage objects, and pieces of cultural memory. Music is especially important to my work because a song can hold an entire period of someone’s life inside of a few minutes. I am fascinated by the things we attach memories to and how an ordinary object can become an archive.
In February 2024, when I formally established Worthwhile Baggage as an LLC, I set a goal for myself: I wanted my work to reach Art Basel Miami by 2026. At the time, it felt ambitious enough that I gave myself nearly three years to accomplish it. Instead, that goal was actualized just ten months later, when I exhibited at Spectrum Miami during Art Basel week in December 2024. That experience became an important marker for me, not simply because of where I exhibited, but because it showed me how quickly the trajectory of your life can change when you are willing to take your own vision seriously.
Getting here has not been easy. I have built this practice while navigating significant personal transitions, uncertainty, financial investment, rejection, logistical challenges, and the vulnerability that comes with creating work that doesn’t fit neatly into a traditional category. There have been moments when continuing would have been much easier to abandon than justify. But every obstacle has pushed me to become more resourceful and more certain about why I create.
What started quietly has now taken me places I could not have predicted. My work has been exhibited at Spectrum Miami during Art Basel, Red Dot Miami, Artexpo New York, New York Fashion Week, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, and galleries and cultural spaces in Washington, DC and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Most recently, I brought Worthwhile Baggage to InvestFest in Atlanta, placing the work within another powerful space centered on entrepreneurship, culture, ownership, and possibility. I’ve also expanded into retail spaces. Along the way, I have watched people recognize their own memories in my work. That has probably been the most meaningful measure of growth.
My relationship with the U.S. Virgin Islands has also profoundly influenced my evolution as an artist. Moving between DC and the Caribbean expanded the visual language of my work and changed how I thought about place, reinvention, and belonging. My first solo exhibition in St. Thomas, There’s Beauty in Everything, became an embodiment of that philosophy: discarded, overlooked, nostalgic, or seemingly ordinary things can carry extraordinary stories when we choose to see them differently.
Today, I think of Worthwhile Baggage as larger than handbags. The pieces may be wearable and functional, but they are ultimately vessels for storytelling. They carry music, geography, history, joy, grief, nostalgia, identity, and pieces of the people we have been.
I am still building, still experimenting, and still figuring things out as I go. But perhaps that is the most honest part of my story. I did not arrive here because the road was particularly easy or because everything unfolded according to plan. I arrived here because, through every transition, I kept making something.
And somewhere along the way, the baggage became worthwhile.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
No, it has not been a smooth road. In fact, one of the greatest challenges has been accepting that the road I carefully prepared myself for was not necessarily the road I was meant to stay on.
Historically, I have been a very left-brained person. I was comfortable in spaces that rewarded structure, analysis, strategy, and predictability. I had not seriously touched art since I was a child, and becoming an artist was never part of the plan. I also wasn’t raised to think of art as a particularly practical career path. Education, stability, and building a secure professional life were emphasized, so that is exactly what I did.
Then the ground shifted.
As the country and the federal landscape began changing, I was laid off from what I considered a comfortable, stable position with the U.S. Department of Education. There is something incredibly disorienting about doing everything you were taught was “right,” building the résumé, establishing the career, finding security, and then discovering that security can disappear anyway.
That experience forced me to pivot in a way I never anticipated. Art had never been my backup plan because, frankly, I never considered it a plan at all.
One of my biggest struggles was giving myself permission to take my creativity seriously. I had to challenge my own ideas about what a successful life was supposed to look like. I went from knowing how to navigate established systems to building something where there was no blueprint, no guaranteed paycheck, and no clear indication that any of it would work. I had to learn not only how to create again, but how to trust my instincts, price my work, advocate for its value, accept rejection, invest money without guaranteed returns, and walk into rooms where I sometimes had to explain that what I make belongs there.
Interestingly, I have also discovered that becoming an artist did not require me to abandon the analytical part of myself. It gave that part of me somewhere new to go. As my work has evolved, I have become increasingly interested in the intersection of art, design, technology, and engineering. I am currently working with the engineering and design team at Terrapin Works within the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering to develop and iterate a prototype for one of my original handbag concepts. Seeing an idea move from something I imagined, to a technical design, to physical prototypes has been one of the clearest examples of how the two sides of my thinking now work together. I can obsess over the emotion, history, music, and visual story of a piece while also thinking about tolerances, materials, construction, functionality, and how it can actually be built.
There is an irony in losing stability and discovering possibility. Being laid off felt like a door closing at the time, but it forced me to look seriously at a part of myself I might otherwise have continued treating as a hobby. The analytical side of me didn’t disappear. It became part of the artist and entrepreneur I am now.
The obstacles haven’t stopped. Building an independent art business requires an extraordinary amount of resilience, particularly when you’re creating work that doesn’t fit neatly into one box. But I’ve learned that a pivot isn’t always a detour.
Sometimes it is the first time you’re actually choosing your own direction.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I often describe Worthwhile Baggage as wearable storytelling, but I think the instinct behind the work started long before I ever considered myself an artist.
I have always been a collector of things. I have a difficult time letting objects go, particularly when I feel they carry some history, memory, or evidence of a time that is disappearing. For years, that simply meant I accumulated things. Now I look at that instinct differently. I realize that, in many ways, I have been preserving artifacts.
That has become incredibly important to my practice because I know I am sitting on objects that may never exist in quite the same way again. Cassette tapes, vinyl records, old magazines and printed materials, vintage textiles, sheet music, packaging, photographs, hardware, and seemingly insignificant pieces of everyday life all tell us something about when and how people lived. Things become obsolete so quickly now that we sometimes don’t realize something was culturally significant until it has nearly disappeared.
Art has actually helped me learn how to let go. I can let go of an object’s original purpose because I know I can preserve its story differently.
That is where much of Worthwhile Baggage begins.
I specialize in transforming unexpected, nostalgic, and often repurposed materials into functional works of art. A cigar box can become a handbag. A cassette can become part of a larger story. Something that spent decades being used one way can suddenly have an entirely different life. I am less interested in restoring objects to what they once were than asking what else they can become.
Music is one of the strongest languages within my work because it has an almost supernatural relationship with memory. You can hear the first few seconds of a song and suddenly remember exactly where you were, who you loved, what your mother played in the house, or what summer you thought would last forever. When I use a cassette or record, I am conscious that I am working with more than a material. For somebody, that object is a time capsule.
Increasingly, I have incorporated NFC technology into my work so those physical artifacts can connect to a digital experience, often through a curated playlist. I love the contradiction of that: something analog and increasingly rare carrying technology that allows it to speak again. The past isn’t simply being displayed. It becomes interactive.
I also don’t really consider myself a traditional handbag designer. Function matters to me, but the bag is the vessel. The story is the work. A Worthwhile Baggage piece can hang on a gallery wall and then be taken down and carried into the world. I don’t believe functionality diminishes its value as art. I think there is something powerful about allowing art, history, and memory to travel with a person.
What I am most proud of is developing a visual language that feels unmistakably mine without having come through traditional artistic training. That freedom allows me to use the “wrong” material, combine things that supposedly don’t belong together, or preserve something another person might overlook.
Worthwhile Baggage ultimately asks questions about value. What deserves to be saved? Who decides when something has outlived its usefulness? What happens to our cultural memory when the physical objects that held it disappear? And can something become more meaningful in its second life than it was in its first?
For most of my life, I thought I simply had trouble throwing things away.
Now I understand that I was learning how to see value in what other people were finished with.
And that may be the foundation of my work.
Are there any important lessons you’ve learned that you can share with us?
The most important lesson I have learned is that you cannot wait for permission to become who you are becoming.
For much of my life, I understood progress as something fairly structured: prepare, become qualified, follow the appropriate steps, and eventually arrive at the next level. Art has taught me almost the exact opposite.
There is no perfect moment when someone taps you on the shoulder and tells you that you are officially an artist. There is no committee that decides your work is ready to be seen. And there is rarely a moment when you feel completely prepared for the opportunity in front of you.
At some point, you simply have to decide that you are ready enough to begin.
I have learned to apply for opportunities before I feel completely qualified, to enter rooms where no one invited me personally, to submit the unconventional piece, to ask the question, to send the email, to introduce myself, and to allow other people to tell me “no” rather than eliminating myself before they ever have the opportunity to tell me “yes.”
That has been transformative.
I’ve also learned that rejection is rarely as definitive as it feels. Some opportunities I desperately wanted did not happen. Some things I thought would change everything barely moved the needle. Meanwhile, opportunities I could never have planned for have altered the direction of my work entirely. I’ve learned not to confuse one closed door with a verdict on my ability.
Perhaps most importantly, I have stopped believing that I need to have everything figured out before moving forward. So much of Worthwhile Baggage has been built through experimentation: trying something, learning from it, changing it, and trying again. There is tremendous freedom in realizing that your first attempt does not have to be your final form.
I used to think confidence came before action. This journey has taught me that it is usually the other way around. You do the frightening thing, survive it, learn something, and become a little more certain that you can handle the next one.
So now, when an idea feels slightly too ambitious, I pay attention to it.
I’ve learned that sometimes the distance between the life you have and the life you can imagine is simply the willingness to begin before you feel ready.
Pricing:
- Original Wearable Art Carries | $195–$495+ — My one-of-one signature works remain at the heart of Worthwhile Baggage. These are individually constructed, highly detailed pieces intended to exist as both functional handbags and collectible art.
- DC Minis & Wristlets | $95 — These pieces offer a more accessible entry point into Worthwhile Baggage while maintaining the storytelling and individuality of the larger works. Many draw from the culture, history, music, and visual language of Washington, DC.
- • Interactive Record & Cassette Charms | $45–$75 — A newer extension of the practice that allows me to translate the Worthwhile Baggage ethos into smaller objects. Many incorporate NFC technology, connecting the physical piece to curated music and digital experiences and allowing the storytelling to continue beyond the object itself.
- In Development | Scaling the Story — One of my greatest opportunities, and challenges, is figuring out how to scale a practice built entirely around one-of-one work. Every Worthwhile Baggage piece that exists has been made individually by my own two hands. There is no production line behind the work. That intimacy is fundamental to what makes Worthwhile Baggage what it is, and I never want growth to come at the expense of it. But it also creates a very real question: How do you scale something when, historically, every additional piece has required more of your own hands and time? I have started exploring two ways to answer that question without sacrificing the soul of the work. The first is a series of small storytelling apparel drops created in collaboration with local creatives. I have collected clothing almost as enthusiastically as I have collected art materials, so this has become another form of repurposing for me. We develop original prints, many inspired by Washington, DC culture, music, language, and memory, and use them to give existing clothing a new story. Most pieces are expected to begin around $50, with more elaborate or one-of-one garments priced accordingly. The second is an original handbag prototype I am developing with Terrapin Works at the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering. The goal is to take some of the construction challenges I currently solve entirely by hand and translate them into a thoughtfully designed, replicable shell, while preserving the opportunity for each finished piece to remain distinct. I am not interested in mass-producing the art. I am interested in engineering a foundation that allows the art to grow. Final pricing for the new handbag is still being determined as we refine the prototype, materials, and production process. For me, scaling Worthwhile Baggage does not mean making everything identical or removing my hands from the process. It means determining which parts can be replicated so that I can devote more of my hands, time, and imagination to the parts that should never be.
- • Why the range matters: Pricing has become an important part of how I think about the future of Worthwhile Baggage. My larger one-of-one works naturally perform well in gallery and art environments, but the extraordinary support I have received from the DMV community made me think more deeply about accessibility. At the same time, federal layoffs and broader economic transitions have affected the community around me. Rather than lowering the value of my original artwork, I challenged myself to create new formats at different price points. It has allowed Worthwhile Baggage to expand without compromising its soul: the collectible works remain collectible, while more people can find an authentic point of entry into the world I am building.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://Www.worthwhilebaggage.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/worthwhile.baggage?utm_source=qr
