Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith is an influential contemporary American artist renowned for her multidisciplinary explorations of the human body, nature, and spirituality. Her work, spanning sculpture, printmaking, drawing, and tapestry, often confronts themes of mortality, abjection, and the feminine experience, drawing from sources as diverse as fairy tales, Catholicism, and anatomy. Since emerging in the 1980s, she has become a pivotal figure in expanding the boundaries of figurative art and has been widely exhibited at major institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Early life and education

Born in Nuremberg to American parents, she is the daughter of the renowned minimalist sculptor Tony Smith and actress and opera singer Jane Lawrence. Her childhood in South Orange, New Jersey, was immersed in the New York City art world, with family friends including Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and Tennessee Williams. She attended the Hartford Art School in Connecticut but left in 1976 before graduating, moving to New York City where she initially collaborated with the artist collective Collaborative Projects, Inc. (Colab). This period was formative, exposing her to punk art and DIY practices that influenced her later, more visceral work.

Artistic career and themes

Emerging in the early 1980s, her practice was galvanized by the AIDS crisis and feminist discourse, leading to a profound focus on the corporeal and its vulnerabilities. Early works involved creating objects from materials like glass, bronze, and paper that explicitly depicted bodily fluids and organs, challenging taboos. Her thematic scope broadened to incorporate mythology, folklore, and religious iconography, often reinterpreting figures from Grimms' Fairy Tales or the lives of Christian saints. This synthesis of the sacred and the profane, the biological and the narrative, defines a career that consistently investigates themes of birth, decay, and redemption.

Major works and exhibitions

Notable early works include "Tale" (1992), a narrative installation featuring a glass female figure and a trail of glass beads, and the haunting "Virgin Mary" (1992), a beeswax sculpture. A major breakthrough was her participation in the 1991 Whitney Biennial. Subsequent significant exhibitions include a 2006 retrospective organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis that traveled to the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Major public installations include "Rapture" (2001) at the San Jose Museum of Art and a series of stained glass windows for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Recognition and influence

She has received numerous accolades, including the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture in 2000, the 50th Venice Biennale’s Ambassador for Culture award in 2003, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women's Caucus for Art in 2009. In 2005, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and later received the U.S. Department of State's Medal of Arts in 2017. Her influence is evident in her role as a mentor and her impact on younger artists working in figurative sculpture and feminist art, bridging the gap between the body art of the 1970s and contemporary practices.

Personal life

She has lived and worked primarily in New York City's Lower East Side for decades. While intensely private, her personal history, including the early deaths of her father and sister, is understood to deeply inform her artistic preoccupations with mortality and family. She is also known for her collaborative spirit, having worked with artists like Margaret Wharton and the poet Anne Waldman.

Category:American sculptors Category:American printmakers Category:Contemporary artists Category:Artists from New York City Category:1954 births