Kiki Smith

Artist

• Born: January 18, 1954
• Place of Birth: Nuremberg, Germany

Education: Hartford Art School

Significance: Kiki Smith is a German-born American artist whose work is known for pushing boundaries. Many of her pieces focus on the human body and its functions. Smith does not shy away from depicting the body at its most vulnerable and using her art to make political statements. Although she is a sculptor, Smith also works as a printmaker.

Background

Kiki Smith was born on January 18, 1954, in Nuremberg, Germany. Her mother, Jane Lawrence, was an opera singer and actress. Her father, Tony Smith, was a well-known sculptor. She grew up in South Orange, New Jersey, with her younger twin sisters, Beatrice and Seton. Art was a part of life in the Smith household. Famed playwright Tennessee Williams had been the best man at her parents' wedding. Artists including Richard Tuttle and Jackson Pollock would stop by their home to visit with Smith's father. Smith recalls she and her sisters regularly worked as their father's assistants. Yet Smith did not aspire to become a sculptor like her father back then. As she told an interviewer in a profile aired on NPR, she was more interested in design work as a child.

After high school, Smith attended the Hartford Art School in Connecticut. However, she left school after less than two years. In 1976, when she was twenty-two, Smith moved to New York City. As a young woman, she held various jobs and worked on art in her spare time. Smith worked as an electrician's assistant and as a cook. She also did demolition and studied industrial baking. In 1978, Smith joined Collaborative Projects Inc. This organization allowed artists to show their work outside of mainstream galleries.

In 1980, Smith's father passed away. Around this time, she began to work themes of life and death into her art. One of her first pieces to focus on the body was Hand in Jar (1983), which featured a mold of a human hand covered in algae in a mason jar of water.

Life's Work

Smith soon turned her attention to studying the human body and using it in her work. She even went so far as to study to become an emergency medical technician in 1985 to learn more about the body. That same year, Smith completed a series of screen prints and monotypes called Possession Is Nine-Tenths of the Law. This series featured depictions of various internal organs.

Smith's art was also influenced by the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Works such as Game Time (1986) focused on bodily fluids, the substances through which HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, can be transferred. Game Time featured twelve glass jars filled with blood on a shelf with a message that tells viewers that there are twelve pints of blood in the body. Untitled (1986) featured twelve empty glass jars with the names of various bodily secretions, including blood and semen. Smith lost many friends to AIDS in the 1980s. Her sister Beatrice was diagnosed with the disease during this time as well. She passed away in 1988. The loss also influenced Smith's work.

By this time, the artist had started focusing on the body not just as a representation of mortality but also as a political tool. Her pieces often focused on female bodies and provoked viewers to question who had ownership of these bodies. Womb (1986) was a bronze cast of a swollen uterus with a hinge on the side, allowing it to open. Inside, viewers find the womb empty. Experts say this is a comment on the lack of control women have over their own bodies. Untitled (1988–1990) featured more than two hundred crystal sperm. Art critics have commented on how the piece suggests the power of male semen to help create life and spread disease.

In the following decade, many of Smith's pieces focused on the body at its most vulnerable and, in many people's minds, revolting. Critics considered many of these pieces to be vulgar or disturbing. The 1992 work Pee Body features a sculpture of a naked woman urinating. Similarly, the piece Tale (1992) depicts a woman on all fours, with a trail of feces following behind her. Smith has said that the piece is about humiliation and the internalization of shame.

The artist has also focused on religious figures and storybook characters in her work. Virgin Mary (1992) is a provocative beeswax sculpture of a female, partly flayed. In 1999, Smith created Daughter, a sculpture of cloth, hair, and paper that appears to depict Little Red Riding Hood transforming into a werewolf.

Smith has also worked in printmaking and etching. One of her etchings, Rapture (2002), features a naked female being attacked by a lion. Some of the artist's later works moved away from depictions of the human body to focus on other topics. Dolls are the subjects of the sculptures Io (2005) and Miss May (2007). In a 2017 article in Interview magazine, Smith said she was working on drawings of owls and trees. That summer, the Venice Biennale featured the artist's star sculptures made of glass and steel.

In October 2022, the Albuquerque Museum in Albuquerque, New Mexico, presented Smith's solo exhibition From the Creek. The works are inspired by nature in the Catskill Mountains in New York. The exhibition, which included sculpture, works on paper, and some large tapestries, opened on October 8 and ran through February 12, 2023.

Smith created five glass mosaics that were installed in New York City's Grand Central Madison station, which opened in December 2022. The Spring depicts wild turkeys and took the artist two years to complete. River Light depicts sunshine on the East River. The other works are The Water's Way, The Presence, and The Sound.

Smith's Given was included in an exhibition at the New York Public Library in 2024. Line & Thread: Prints and Textiles from the 1600s to the Present opened September 7.

Impact

Smith's work has had a great effect on the art world. Her envelope-pushing style has been inspirational to other female artists. Her work has even permeated popular culture. A character mentioned Smith's work on the television series The L Word. Pop singer Madonna is also a fan and collector of Smith's work.

Personal Life

Smith's pieces have been featured in more than twenty-five museum exhibitions. She has received numerous honors for her work. In 2000, she received the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture. Smith was honored with the Edward MacDowell Medal in 2009 and the Nelson A. Rockefeller Award the following year. In 2013, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented Smith with the US Department of State Medal of Arts. In 2017, she was named an Honorary Royal Academician by the Royal Academy of Arts in London, England.

Bibliography

Julavits, Heidi. "Kiki Smith." Interview, 17 July 2017, www.interviewmagazine.com/art/kiki-smith/#‗. Accessed 24 Sept. 2017.

"Kiki Smith." Guggenheim, www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/kiki-smith. Accessed 24 Sept. 2017.

"Kiki Smith." Pace Gallery, www.pacegallery.com/artists/442/kiki-smith. Accessed 24 Sept. 2017.

"Kiki Smith: From the Creek." City of Albuquerque, 2022, www.cabq.gov/artsculture/albuquerque-museum/exhibitions/kiki-smith. Accessed 7 Oct. 2024.

Kimmelman, Michael. "The Intuitionist." New York Times Magazine, 5 Nov. 2006, www.nytimes.com/2006/11/05/magazine/05kiki.html. Accessed 24 Sept. 2017.

"Line & Thread: Prints and Textiles from the 1600s to the Present to Open at the New York Public Library." New York Public Library, 31 July 2024, www.nypl.org/press/line-thread-prints-and-textiles-1600s-present-open-new-york-public-library. Accessed 7 Oct. 2024.

Loos, Ted. "Now Arriving: Yayoi Kusama and Kiki Smith's Grand Central Madison Mosaics." The New York Times, 30 Nov. 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/11/30/arts/design/grand-central-madison-kiki-smith-yayoi-kusama.html. Accessed 7 Oct. 2024.

Schjeldahl, Peter. "Queen of Arts." New Yorker, 27 Nov. 2006, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/11/27/queen-of-arts. Accessed 24 Sept. 2017.

Sydell, Laura. "Artist Kiki Smith: A Profile." NPR, 9 Oct. 2006, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6225036. Accessed 24 Sept. 2017.