Over her four-decade-long career, artist Kiki Smith has made sculptures of body parts, tapestries depicting animals and the cosmos, and drawings of wolves and women—a strange confluence of the corporeal and the fantastic, with distinct feminist undertones. Smith is known as a leader of the downtown art scene that emerged in Manhattan throughout the 1980s, and many of her pieces have a dark fairy-tale quality—as if they could illustrate pages from the Brothers Grimm. I expected for the artist herself to have a bit of magic about her.
So I was surprised, on a recent visit to Smith’s East Village apartment, to watch her scratch at a piece of plexiglass for over an hour with hands tattooed with little turquoise dots. It was a rainy Tuesday afternoon, and Smith was working on a print for an upcoming exhibition at the Deste Foundation in Greece. Each dutiful scratch emphasized just how banal and unmagical the process of artmaking can truly be.
Kiki Smith works on a tapestry in the studio in her East Village home. Photo by Daniel Dorsa for Artsy.
Smith said that the scratch marks would ultimately result in multiple prints and sculptures of a capricorn—the mythical figure with a goat’s body and fish’s tail that is also the artist’s astrological sign. Indeed, she’s known for her seriality, spinning concepts and images into one work after another, until something new piques her interest. Her sources of inspiration remain in flux, but Smith’s work itself tends to revolve around the body, death, mythology, and nature. Rumpelstiltskin may have been able to weave hay into gold, but there’s no alchemy to Smith’s practice: just hours of making, year after year.
When I visit Smith, she’s in the midst of multiple projects in addition to the Deste show, among them an exhibition entitled “Murmur” at Pace Gallery(through March 30th). She’s still finalizing the details.
“Sometimes I have things that I want to do,” she says breezily. “But in general, I just go through the space, and then that tells you what to do.” She sounds laissez-faire, and there is a level of unpredictability to her planning: One venue might inspire a full body of work, while another might require a grouping of previous series into a new conceptual whole.
There’s little art in Smith’s studio, so she shows me an image of a sculpture, bound for the Pace show, on her phone. It’s a jagged, triangular black form with multipoint stars emerging from the surface. It looks like a fallen-over Christmas tree: simultaneously stark, rough, and hopeful. “That’s a wave,” Smith says. It doesn’t resemble any wave I’ve ever seen. Yugoslavian World War II monuments, called spomenik, inspired the shape, she says, showing me a picture of one of these, too, on her phone: two craggy stone hunks that emerge from the earth parallel to each other, then fan outward. “I just think those sculptures are very beautiful,” she says. “They’re culturally very different from how we make memorials.” The water was a particular draw for Smith. “Water holds memories,” she says. Her explanations, like her work, are often simultaneously lyrical and opaque.
Kiki Smith, Wave, 2016. © Kiki Smith. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
Smith was born into an artistic family. She was born in Germany, where her mother, Jane Lawrence, was working as an opera singer. In 1955, when the artist was one year old, her family moved to New Jersey, where she spent the remainder of her childhood. Her father,
Tony Smith, was an artist, known for his own monumental black sculptures. He rose to prominence in the mid-1960s, and curator Kynaston McShine included him in “Primary Structures,” the Jewish Museum’s iconic 1966 show on American and British
Minimalism. He also showed at the Venice Biennale and multiple Whitney Annuals (the predecessor to the Whitney Biennial) during his lifetime.
Smith began her artistic apprenticeship earlier than most of her peers: Along with her sisters Seton and Beatrice, she helped her father in his studio from a young age. In 1974, she enrolled in Connecticut’s Hartford Art School, yet she dropped out after just three semesters and settled back into Manhattan. Smith says she was around age 24 when she decided to become a professional artist.
“I didn’t know what else to do particularly. I liked making things,” she says.
Portrait of Kiki Smith in her New York home and studio. Below the couch, archival boxes store rubbings and templates from past work. Portrait by Daniel Dorsa for Artsy.