Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith (born January 18, 1954) is a German-born American artist whose work has addressed the themes of sex, birth and regeneration. Her figurative work of the late 1980s and early 1990s confronted subjects such as AIDS, feminism, and gender, while recent works have depicted the human condition in relationship to nature.

Early Life and Education

Smith's father was artist Tony Smith (American, 1912–1980), and her mother was actress and opera singer Jane Lawrence Smith. Although her work takes a very different form than that of her parents, early exposure to her father’s process of making geometric sculptures allowed her to experience Modernism's formal craftsmanship firsthand. Her childhood experience in the Catholic Church, combined with a fascination for the human body, shaped her artwork conceptually.

Move to New York City and Collaborative Projects

Smith moved from Germany to South Orange, New Jersey, as an infant in 1955. That same year, her sisters, Seton Smith (American) and Beatrice “Bebe” Smith, were born in Newark, New Jersey.

She attended Columbia High School in Connecticut before moving to New York City in 1976 and joining Collaborative Projects (Colab), an artist collective. The influence of this radical group's use of unconventional materials can be seen in her work.

Work

From 1982, she has exhibited annually at the Fawbush Gallery in New York; her work received significant attention in 1990 during her exhibition for the Projects Room at the Museum of Modern Art. Although clearly familiar with Minimalism from a young age, her work is aligned more closely with the sculptures of female artists Louise Bourgeois (American/French, 1911–2010) and Eva Hesse (American, 1936–1970); two artists active in the Anti-Form movement, who created objects that defied traditional object-making. Smith’s body art sculptures ironically parallel the erotic representations of women in art history, and simultaneously expose constructions of gender and sexuality.

Often the biological systems she recalls in her sculptures, including blood, semen, breast milk, and urine in her work, serve as metaphors for the socially constructed nature of identity.

Major Achievements and Legacy

Smith received the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture in 2000, the Athena Award for Excellence in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2005, the fiftieth Edward MacDowell Medal from the MacDowell Colony in 2009, and has participated in the Whitney Biennial three times in the past decade. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2006.

Smith’s work is in numerous prominent museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Her legacy lies not only in her innovative techniques and compelling imagery but also in her courage to confront difficult truths and give voice to marginalized experiences.