31 Facts About Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith's father was artist Tony Kiki Smith and her mother was actress and opera singer Jane Lawrence.

Kiki Smith moved from Germany to South Orange, New Jersey, as an infant in 1955.

That same year, her sisters, Seton Kiki Smith and Beatrice Kiki Smith, were born in Newark, New Jersey.

Kiki Smith subsequently attended Columbia High School, but left to attend Changes, Inc Later, she was enrolled at Hartford Art School in Connecticut for eighteen months from 1974 to 1975.

Kiki Smith then moved to New York City in 1976 and joined Collaborative Projects, an artist collective.

Kiki Smith has gone on to create works that explore a wide range of human organs; including sculptures of hearts, lungs, stomach, liver and spleen.

In 1984 Kiki Smith finished a definitively unfinished feminist no wave super8 film, begun in 1981, entitled Cave Girls.

Kiki Smith has experimented with a wide range of printmaking processes.

In 1988 she created All Souls, a fifteen-foot screen-print work featuring repetitive images of a fetus, an image Kiki Smith found in a Japanese anatomy book.

Kiki Smith printed the image in black ink on 36 attached sheets of handmade Thai paper.

Kiki Smith wears a chain around her ankle; her face is relatively undetailed and is turned upwards.

Kiki Smith has said that when making Mary Magdalene she was inspired by depictions of Mary Magdalene in Southern German sculpture, where she was depicted as a "wild woman".

Kiki Smith's sculpture "Standing", featuring a female figure standing atop the trunk of a Eucalyptus tree, is a part of the Stuart Collection of public art on the campus of the University of California, San Diego.

Lodestar, Kiki Smith's 2010 installation at the Pace Gallery, was an exhibition of free-standing stained glass works painted with life-size figures.

In 2019, Kiki Smith conceived Memory, a site specific installation for the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art on the Greek island of Hydra.

Kiki Smith has created unique books, including: Fountainhead ; The Vitreous Body ; and Untitled.

In 2012, Kiki Smith showed a series of three of these woven editions at the Neuberger Museum of Art.

In 2022, Kiki Smith to created a series of five giant mosaics for Manhattan train station at Grand Central Madison station, located beneath the Grand Central Terminal.

Kiki Smith was an active member of Collaborative Projects and ABC No Rio; participating in many Potato Wolf broadcasts and the Cardboard Air Band.

Kiki Smith collaborated with David Wojnarowicz on her first solo exhibition, Life Wants to Live, at The Kitchen.

Kiki Smith has worked with poet Anne Waldman on If I Could Say This With My Body, Would I I Would.

Kiki Smith collaborated on a performance featuring choreographer Douglas Dunn and Dancers, musicians Ha-Yang Kim, Daniel Carter, Ambrose Bye, and Devin Brahja Waldman, performed by and set to Anne Waldman's poem Jaguar Harmonics.

In 1980, Kiki Smith participated in the Colab organized exhibition The Times Square Show.

In 1982, Kiki Smith received her first solo exhibition, Life Wants to Live, at The Kitchen.

In 1996, Kiki Smith exhibited in a group show at SITE Santa Fe, along with Kara Walker.

At the Walker, Kiki Smith coauthored the catalogue raisonne with curator Siri Engberg.

In 2008, Kiki Smith gave Selections from Animal Skulls to the Walker in honor of Engberg.

In 2019 the Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna, Austria, presented a solo show of Kiki Smith entitled "Processions", presenting about sixty works from the last three decades.

Kiki Smith was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, in 2005.

In 2012, Kiki Smith received the US State Department Medal of Arts from Hillary Clinton.

In 2016, Kiki Smith was awarded the International Sculpture Center's Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award.