Kiki Smith facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Kiki Smith
|
|
|---|---|
Kiki Smith in 2013
|
|
| Born | January 18, 1954 |
| Nationality | German American |
| Known for | Printmaking, sculpture, drawing |
Kiki Smith (born January 18, 1954) is a famous German-American artist. Her art often explores themes like birth, new beginnings, and how humans connect with nature. In her earlier work, she looked at important topics like human rights and identity. Kiki Smith lives and works in New York City and the Hudson Valley, New York.
Contents
Becoming an Artist: Kiki Smith's Early Life
Kiki Smith's father was a well-known sculptor named Tony Smith. Her mother, Jane Lawrence, was an actress and opera singer. Growing up, Kiki saw her father create geometric sculptures. This helped her learn about making art with her hands. She was also interested in the human body and her childhood experiences in the Catholic Church. These ideas shaped her art.
Kiki moved from Germany to South Orange, New Jersey, in 1955 when she was a baby. She went to Columbia High School. Later, she studied at Hartford Art School for about a year and a half. In 1976, she moved to New York City. There, she joined a group of artists called Collaborative Projects, or Colab. This group used unusual materials in their art, which influenced Kiki's own work. For a short time in 1984, she even studied to be an emergency medical technician. This helped her learn more about the human body, which she then used in her sculptures. By 1990, she started creating full human figures.
Kiki Smith's Artworks
What Inspires Kiki Smith's Art?
After her father passed away in 1980, and her sister, Beatrice “Bebe” Smith, died in 1988 due to illness, Kiki Smith began to explore life and death in her art. She created many artworks that show different parts of the human body. These include sculptures of hearts, lungs, stomachs, and other organs.
Films by Kiki Smith
In 1984, Kiki Smith finished a film called Cave Girls. She started it in 1981, and it was a feminist film. She worked on it with Ellen Cooper.
Kiki Smith's Prints
Kiki Smith has tried many different ways of making prints. Some of her first prints were on dresses, scarves, and shirts. They often showed images of body parts. In the early 1980s, she also made many posters with Colab. These posters shared political messages or announced events. One example is her The Island of Negative Utopia poster from 1983.
In 1988, she created All Souls. This was a very large screen-print, about fifteen feet long. It showed many repeated images of a fetus, which she found in a Japanese anatomy book. She printed this image in black ink on 36 sheets of handmade paper. Both the MoMA and the Whitney Museum have large collections of her prints. In her Blue Prints series from 1999, Kiki Smith used a special printmaking method called aquatint. For example, in Virgin with Dove, she used an airbrush with aquatint. This created a soft, glowing effect around the figures.
Sculptures by Kiki Smith
Kiki Smith is well-known for her sculptures. One famous piece is Mary Magdalene (1994). It's made of silicon bronze and steel. The female figure has a chain around her ankle. Her face is simple and looks upwards. Smith said she was inspired by old German sculptures of Mary Magdalene as a "wild woman."
Another sculpture, "Standing" (1998), shows a female figure standing on a Eucalyptus tree trunk. You can see it at the University of California, San Diego. Her sculpture Lilith, made of bronze with glass eyes, is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's a striking piece, hanging upside down on a gallery wall. In 2005, Kiki Smith's art display Homespun Tales was very popular at the 51st Venice Biennale. In 2010, her Lodestar exhibit at the Pace Gallery featured tall, stained-glass artworks with life-size figures painted on them.
Special Art Projects (Commissions)
Kiki Smith has also created art for specific places. Her first permanent outdoor sculpture was put up in 1998 at the University of California, San Diego. It took five years to create.
In 2010, the Museum at Eldridge Street asked Smith and architect Deborah Gans to design a new window for the historic Eldridge Street Synagogue. This beautiful window was the last big part of the museum's 20-year restoration. In 2018, Smith also had an exhibition of sculptures there called Below the Horizon: Kiki Smith at Eldridge. For the Claire Tow Theater, Smith made Overture (2012). This was a small mobile with wooden planks and bronze birds. In 2019, she created Memory, a special artwork for the DESTE Foundation in Greece.
Kiki Smith's Artist Books
She has also made unique books that are artworks themselves. Some of these include:
- Fountainhead (1991)
- The Vitreous Body (2001)
- Untitled (Book of Hours) (1986)
Tapestries by Kiki Smith
Since the early 2010s, Kiki Smith has created twelve large tapestries. These are woven artworks, each about 9 by 6 feet. They were made using a special machine called a Jacquard loom. In 2012, she showed three of these woven pieces at the Neuberger Museum of Art. In 2019, all twelve were displayed together in Florence, Italy. Smith enjoys making tapestries because they let her work on a much larger scale. She also likes using more color in these pieces, which she doesn't always do in her other art.
Mosaics by Kiki Smith
In 2022, Kiki Smith created five huge mosaics for the new Grand Central Madison station in Manhattan. These mosaics are titled River Light, The Water's Way, The Presence, The Spring, and The Sound.
Working with Other Artists (Collaborations)
Kiki Smith was an active member of Collaborative Projects and ABC No Rio. She worked with many artists on different projects. For example, she collaborated with David Wojnarowicz on her first solo art show, Life Wants to Live. She also worked with Ellen Cooper on the film Cave Girls. Smith has also teamed up with poets like Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Anne Waldman to create books and performances. She also worked with author Lynne Tillman.
Art Shows (Exhibitions)
In 1980, Kiki Smith took part in The Times Square Show, organized by Colab. In 1982, she had her first solo show, Life Wants to Live. Since then, her art has been shown in nearly 150 solo exhibitions around the world. It has also been featured in hundreds of important group shows. These include the Whitney Biennial in New York and the Venice Biennale in Italy.
Some of her past solo exhibitions have been held at major museums. These include the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In 2005, a big show called Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980-2005 opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This show then traveled to other cities like Minneapolis, Houston, and Mexico City.
Kiki Smith also participated in the 2017 Venice Biennale, a major international art exhibition. In 2018, her sculpture Seer (Alice I) was shown in Regent's Park, London. Also in 2018, an exhibition of her tapestries, sculptures, and drawings was held in London. In 2019, she had solo shows in Paris and Vienna, Austria.
Other Activities
In 2023, Kiki Smith was part of the group that chose the first winner of the New Museum's $400,000 Hostetler/Wrigley Sculpture Award.
Awards and Recognition
Kiki Smith has received many awards for her art. Some of these include:
- The Nelson A. Rockefeller Award (2010)
- Women in the Arts Award from the Brooklyn Museum (2009)
- The Edward MacDowell Medal (2009)
- The Medal Award from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2006)
- The Athena Award for Excellence in Printmaking (2006)
- The Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture (2000)
- She was named one of Time Magazine's "Time 100: The People Who Shape Our World" (2006).
In 2005, she became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, Hillary Clinton gave her the U.S. State Department Medal of Arts. You can even find her artworks in U.S. consulates in Istanbul and Mumbai. In 2016, Kiki Smith received the International Sculpture Center's Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award.
See also
In Spanish: Kiki Smith para niños
