#43 Kiki Smith

"untitled (hanging woman)" 1992

Kiki Smith is an American who was born in Germany in 1954. She is the daughter of American Sculptor Tony Smith. Kiki grew up in New Jersey. One of her first memories of experimenting with art was helping her father make cardboard models for his geometric shapes. Kiki is among the most significant artists of her generation. She is primarily know as a sculptor but she finds her printmaking as equally important. A reoccurring subject in Smith's work is the body as a receptacle for knowledge, belief and storytelling. In the 1980s Smith started to turn the figurative tradition in sculpture inside out, she did this by creating objects and drawings based on organs, cellular forms and the human nervous system. This body of work later developed into involving animals, domestic objects and narrative tropes from classical mythology and folktales. Life, death, and resurrection are thematic elements that are presented in Smith's installations and sculptures. In several of Kiki's recent works she included the life of St. Genevieve, patron saint of Paris. In her works such as "Rapture, Wearing the Skin, and Lying with the Wolf", she portrays St. Genevieve communing with the wolf, taking shelter in it's pelt, and being born from it's womb. With her portrayal of St. Genevieve in this way Smith wanted to represent the symbolic relationships between human and animals. In 2001 Smith received the Skowhegan Medal for sculpture. In 2005 she received the Athena Award for Excellence in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design. Kiki was awarded the 50th Edward MacDowell Medal from the MacDowell Colony in 2009. Smith also has work in many prominent Museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Com temporary Art in Los Angeles. Kiki makes her home in New York where she currently lives and works on her art.


http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/smith/index.html

http://www.blogger.com/www.moma.org/exhibitions/2003/kikismith