Born, 2002 New York artist Kiki Smith was born in a U.S. Army hospital in Nuremburg, West Germany in 1954. Her mother was the opera singer and actress Jane Lawrence, her father the architect, painter and sculptor Tony Smith. She was raised in South Orange, New Jersey with two sisters.
Smith worked with her hands from a young age, quilting, knitting and sewing, as well as helping her father with models for his sculptures. She was attracted early-on to the materials she works in now. Her childhood was rich with myth. Raised Catholic, Smith was also exposed to many cultures’ stories and rituals. She read fairy tales and was encouraged to explore her interests: as a young girl learning about King Tut, for example, she wrapped dead animals found in her backyard in mummy cloth and jewelry. Her adulthood has been rich with experience: She has traveled widely. She is trained as an industrial baker and an emergency medical technician. She has worked in a factory where she airbrushed patterns onto dresses, as an electrician’s assistant, and as a short-order cook.
Moon on Crutches Figure 2, 2002 Best known as a sculptor, she is also no stranger to printmaking. She took her first classes in etching and monotype in 1978 at New York’s Lower East Side Print Shop, and has also studied at Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop in New York. She has had a hand in many silkscreening projects and has made prints with everything from rubber stamps to photocopying. Since 1998, she has taught printmaking courses off and on at Columbia and New York University.
Kiki Smith’s first project at Crown Point Press is a pair of color aquatints inspired by the San Francisco homeless. Home (2006) depicts a pair of boots and the edges of jeans resting on cardboard; its companion, Still (2006), a bare pair of woman’s feet, emerging foreshortened from beneath a dress, stars tattooed on her legs. Both images are drawn in black and white and rest on a ground luminously colored with color etching. True to her dedication to materials, to render the textures of the fabric of both figures’ clothing, Smith and printer Emily York pressed real cloth into the soft ground on the etching plates. The result is a print of a print, a subtle reminder of what is.
Still, 2006 Kiki Smith attended Hartford Art School in Connecticut. She is represented by Pace Wildenstein Gallery in New York. She received the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture in 2000, and has participated three times in the Whitney Biennial. Her retrospective exhibition, “Kiki Smith: A Gathering,” organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, was exhibited there February 28-May 14, 2006. It opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in November 2005, traveling next to the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston July 15-September 24, 2006 and to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York November 16, 2006- February 11, 2007.
All images © Kiki Smith
Coutesy of Pace Wildensteind, New York
*Except “Still” published by Crown Point Press.