A City Hall security guard sketches during his breaks. He just had his first show.
Khalik White has overcome housing insecurity, alcoholism, and even being called the worst artist on Instagram, to become an artist with amazing depth. His coworkers couldn't get enough of his art.
In 2025, Councilmember Rue Landau went in to work through City Hall’s northwest entrance and saw Khalik White sketching in a small sketchbook. It wasn’t the first time Landau had seen White, who works as a security guard, sketching away in the notebook he always had on him.
Both Landau and White began their tenures at City Hall in 2024.
“We all started to notice that on Khalik’s break time, he was always sketching,” she said.
Landau got him a set of colored pencils and word about White’s complex, layered, and linework-based drawings spread throughout City Hall.
“We all wanted to see more and find out about his art,” said Landau.
White, a native of East Orange, NJ, moved to Philadelphia nine years ago and lives near Tioga. He has never taken a drawing class and credits his childhood love for skateboarding for informing his creative pursuits over the years.
Skateboarding, White said, “saved” him. Learning to fall and get back up was vital.
The soft-spoken artist dreamed of becoming a successful voice actor, but after he had his thyroid removed in 2015, it affected the timbre of his voice. After only managing to book a few small roles, he lost his vocal range. He also struggled with housing insecurity and alcoholism, and finally found a job at City Hall as a security contractor in 2024. He is thankful for the help he received from the recovery house Ready, Willing, and Able, which helped get him back on his feet as he embarked on his sobriety journey.
“I just draw to go somewhere else,” said White, who started drawing and posting on Instagram in 2022. At one point, he says, he was called the “worst artist” on the internet.
It only made him want to keep trying. He cites artist Laurie Lipton and her pencil drawings as an inspiration.
A fan of White’s work, Landau mentioned his art to Barbara Kigozi, her office’s director of special operations. When Kigozi caught him sketching at work, White said he was worried she’d think he was slacking. Instead, she and Landau’s art liaison Lauren Rinaldi asked if White had more work at home. They were both surprised by the sheer volume of his work.
“I found him to be an artist with such depth,” Kigozi said. “He’s so private,” she said. “The curiosity for me is how he expresses himself; how it begins and builds.”
The two immediately got to organizing a show of White’s work.
Last month’s show, “A World of Lines,” was a vibrant, and joyful evening celebrating White’s art. Landau directed several attendees — a mix of City Hall employees and friends of White’s — to Untitled which she says is her favorite piece.
It is a drawing of a pill bottle surrounded by diverging black and white pathways and lines.
“To me, [White’s art] speaks to the pressures, tensions, and complications in the world,” she said, adding jokingly that she might have to put in a bid of her own if anyone bought it.
White works with colored pencils — one of his striking pieces features a vibrant yellow figure made of blocks rising from a swirl of colored lines, followed by a similar figure in a shade of gray. His pieces are a feast for the eyes, combining complex patterns and linework in ways that suck in the viewer’s attention. Another piece depicts a person’s profile in focus against an abyss covered in colored squares.
His sobriety and recovery has informed White’s work; he is especially inspired by people in recovery and their different coping mechanisms to maintain their sobriety. The city’s unhoused population also inspires his work that intends to be a “commentary on society.” He doesn’t go into his drawings with set plans, but he takes pencil to paper and goes through his emotions, and sees where the journey takes him.
This approach, he said, is tied to his “lack” of formal training.
Fresh off his first show, White has already found collaborators. Rayshawn A. Johnson Jr., who works as a legislative director at City Hall, is also an aspiring science fiction novelist. White will be illustrating Johnson Jr.’s book cover.
“This is for everybody who said I can’t draw a straight line,” he joked.
