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 artwork often explores themes like birth, new beginnings, and how humans connect with nature. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, her art looked at important topics such as health crises and the roles of men and women in society. Kiki Smith lives and works in New York City and the Hudson Valley.
Contents
Early Life and Education
Kiki Smith's father was the artist Tony Smith, and her mother was the actress and opera singer Jane Lawrence. Even though Kiki's art is very different from her parents', she learned a lot from watching her father create his geometric sculptures. This early experience helped her understand how art is made.
Her childhood experiences in the Catholic Church and her interest in the human body greatly influenced her art ideas.
Smith moved from Germany to South Orange, New Jersey, in 1955 when she was a baby. She later attended Columbia High School. From 1974 to 1975, she studied at Hartford Art School. In 1976, she moved to New York City and joined a group of artists called Collaborative Projects (Colab). This group used unusual materials in their art, which also influenced Kiki Smith's work. For a short time in 1984, she even studied to be an emergency medical technician and made sculptures of body parts. By 1990, she started creating full human figures.
Artistic Work
Exploring Themes in Art
After her father passed away in 1980, and her sister Beatrice "Bebe" Smith died from a serious illness in 1988, Kiki Smith began to explore themes of life and the human body in her art. She created artworks that showed many different human organs, like hearts, lungs, and stomachs. She also explored bodily fluids in her art, which was a way to respond to health crises and women's rights issues of the time.
Films by Kiki Smith
In 1984, Kiki Smith finished a feminist film called Cave Girls. She started this film in 1981 and co-directed it with Ellen Cooper.
Printmaking Techniques
Kiki Smith has tried many different ways of making prints. Some of her first prints were on dresses, scarves, and shirts, often showing images of body parts. In the early 1980s, she made many posters with Colab that shared political messages or announced art events. One example is her The Island of Negative Utopia poster from 1983.
In 1988, she created All Souls, a very large screen-print (about 15 feet long) that showed many repeated images of a fetus. She found this image in a Japanese anatomy book. Smith printed the image in black ink on 36 sheets of handmade paper.
Both the MoMA and the Whitney Museum have large collections of Kiki Smith's prints. In her Blue Prints series from 1999, she experimented with a printing method called aquatint.
Sculptures by Kiki Smith
Mary Magdalene (1994) is a sculpture made of bronze and steel. It shows a unique way of depicting the female form. The figure has a chain around her ankle and her face looks upwards. Smith said she was inspired by old sculptures of Mary Magdalene from Southern Germany, where she was sometimes shown as a "wild woman."
Another sculpture, "Standing" (1998), features a female figure standing on a Eucalyptus tree trunk. This artwork is part of the Stuart Collection at the University of California, San Diego. Her bronze sculpture Lilith, with glass eyes, is displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Lilith is a striking figure, shown hanging upside down on a gallery wall.
In 2005, Smith's art display Homespun Tales was highly praised at the 51st Venice Biennale. In 2010, her exhibition Lodestar at the Pace Gallery featured large stained-glass artworks with life-sized figures painted on them.
Special Art Projects
After five years of planning, Kiki Smith's first permanent outdoor sculpture was placed at the University of California, San Diego in 1998.
In 2010, the Museum at Eldridge Street asked Smith and architect Deborah Gans to create a new, large east window for the historic 1887 Eldridge Street Synagogue in New York. This was the final major part of the museum's 20-year restoration. In 2018, an exhibition of Smith's special sculptures, Below the Horizon: Kiki Smith at Eldridge, was held there.
For the Claire Tow Theater, Smith created Overture (2012), a small mobile made of wooden planks and bronze birds.
In 2019, Smith created Memory, a special art installation for the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art on the Greek island of Hydra.
Artist Books
Kiki Smith has also created unique books, including:
- Fountainhead (1991)
- The Vitreous Body (2001)
- Untitled (Book of Hours) (1986)
Tapestries
Since the early 2010s, Smith has created twelve large tapestries, each about 9 by 6 feet. These were made using a special weaving machine called a Jacquard loom. In 2012, she showed three of these woven artworks at the Neuberger Museum of Art. In early 2019, all twelve were displayed together in Florence, Italy. Smith enjoys making tapestries because they allow her to work on a much larger scale and use more color, which she doesn't always do in her other art.
Mosaics
In 2022, Kiki Smith created five giant mosaics for the new Grand Central Madison station in Manhattan, located beneath the Grand Central Terminal. These mosaics are titled River Light, The Water's Way, The Presence, The Spring, and The Sound.
Working with Others
Kiki Smith was an active member of Collaborative Projects (Colab) and ABC No Rio, participating in many broadcasts and performances. She worked with artist David Wojnarowicz on her first solo art show, Life Wants to Live, at The Kitchen.
During the early 1980s, Smith also worked with Ellen Cooper on the film Cave Girls. Later, she collaborated with poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge on books like Endocrinology (1997) and Concordance (2006). She also worked with author Lynne Tillman to create Madame Realism (1984). Smith has also collaborated with poet Anne Waldman on performances.
Art Exhibitions
In 1980, Kiki Smith took part in The Times Square Show, an exhibition organized by Colab. In 1982, she had her first solo exhibition, Life Wants to Live, at The Kitchen. Since then, her art has been shown in almost 150 solo exhibitions around the world. She has also been part of hundreds of important group exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial in New York (1991, 1993, 2002) and the Venice Biennale (1993, 1999, 2005, 2009).
Past solo exhibitions have been held at places like the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (1996–97), the Museum of Contemporary Art (1996–97), the Irish Museum of Modern Art (1997–98), and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (1998).
In 2005, a major exhibition called Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980-2005 opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This show then traveled to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and finally to La Coleccion Jumex in Mexico.
In 2016, the Walsh Gallery at Seton Hall University hosted Kiki and Seton Smith: A Sense of Place, an exhibition featuring Kiki and her sister Seton Smith.
Kiki Smith also participated in the 2017 Venice Biennale, an important international art exhibition. In 2018, her sculpture Seer (Alice I) was shown at Frieze Sculpture in London, England. Also in 2018, an exhibition of her tapestries, sculptures, and drawings was held at the Timothy Taylor (gallery) in London.
In 2019, the Deste Foundation on Hydra island featured Memory, a special exhibition by Kiki Smith. The 11 Conti – Monnaie de Paris also presented her first solo show in a French public institution that year. In 2019, the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna, Austria, presented a solo show called "Processions," featuring about sixty of her artworks.
Awards and Recognition
Kiki Smith has received many awards for her art. These include the Nelson A. Rockefeller Award (2010), the Women in the Arts Award from the Brooklyn Museum (2009), and the Edward MacDowell Medal (2009). She also received the Medal Award from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2006), and the Athena Award for Excellence in Printmaking (2006). In 2000, she received the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture. In 2006, Time Magazine named her one of "The People Who Shape Our World." She became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York in 2005.
In 2012, Kiki Smith received the U.S. State Department Medal of Arts from Hillary Clinton. Her artworks can be found in U.S. consulates in Istanbul and Mumbai. In 2013, she became an artist-in-residence at the University of North Texas Institute for the Advancement of the Arts.
In 2016, Smith was honored with the International Sculpture Center's Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award.
Images for kids
-
My Blue Lake, a print by Kiki Smith from 1995
See also
In Spanish: Kiki Smith para niños
