Kiki Smith
1954– · American artist born in Germany, contemporary sculptor and printmaker
Kiki Smith (born in Nuremberg in 1954) is an American artist of German birth and one of the leading figures of contemporary art. Although she was born in Germany, she was raised in New Jersey, where she arrived as an infant. The daughter of sculptor Tony Smith, she grew up around her father's modernist geometric sculpture, and as a young person she helped him make cardboard models of his works, which gave her a firsthand understanding of the formal craft of modern art.
Her training was uneven. She studied at the Hartford Art School in Connecticut from 1974 to 1975 and, the following year, moved to New York City, where she joined the artist collective Collaborative Projects (Colab). The group's use of unconventional materials left a mark on her work. By about 1990 she had begun making human figures. Her output centres on the body, mortality and internal organs. After the death of her father in 1980 and of her sister, the underground actress Beatrice "Bebe" Smith, from AIDS in 1988, she began an investigation into the physicality of the body that included hearts, lungs, livers and spleens, as well as bodily fluids with clear social meaning, such as blood in relation to the AIDS crisis, and urine, menstrual blood and feces in relation to women's rights.
Smith works across many media: bronze, glass and steel sculpture, printmaking, textiles and drawing. In printmaking, All Souls (1988), a large screen print of repeated images of a fetus, stands out, as does the Blue Prints series (1999), in which she experimented with aquatint. Her sculpture Mary Magdalene (1994) shows a nude figure almost without skin, and Lilith (1994), a bronze woman with glass eyes, hangs upside down on a wall. In 2005 her installation Homespun Tales was widely acclaimed at the Venice Biennale. Since the early 2010s she has made Jacquard tapestries, and in 2022 she created five large mosaics for Grand Central Madison station.
Her legacy lies in joining political and feminist reflection with a body of work that addresses the body and regeneration, and in moving across techniques and formats while keeping a personal voice.