Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith (born January 18, 1954 in Nuremberg, West Germany) is a German‑American visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice encompasses sculpture, printmaking, drawing, tapestry, film, and public commissions. Raised in a family of creatives—her father the minimalist sculptor Tony Smith and her mother the actress and opera singer Jane Lawrence—she absorbed modernist rigor and theatrical sensibility from an early age. After emigrating to the United States as an infant, she grew up in South Orange, New Jersey, and later attended Columbia High School before briefly studying at Hartford Art School. In 1976 she moved to New York City and joined the radical artist collective Collaborative Projects (Colab), an experience that introduced her to unconventional materials and collaborative strategies that would define much of her later work. The early 1980s saw her producing screen‑printed dresses and politically charged posters, while a brief stint as an emergency medical technician in 1984 deepened her fascination with the human body and its vulnerabilities. The death of her father in 1980 and her sister Beatrice “Bebe” Smith in 1988 propelled her toward stark investigations of mortality, resulting in a series of sculptures and prints that render organs, fluids, and bodily processes with unflinching intimacy. Kiki Smith has since exhibited in nearly 150 solo shows worldwide, including major surveys at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Whitney Museum, and her work forms part of the permanent collections of MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Tate. Her public commissions range from the monumental east window of the Eldridge Street Synagogue (2010) to a series of five mosaics for Grand Central Madison station (2022). In addition to visual art, she co‑directed the underground No Wave film Cave Girls (1984) and collaborated with poets, musicians, and choreographers, demonstrating a lifelong commitment to interdisciplinary dialogue. Recognized with honors such as the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture (2000), the Edward MacDowell Medal (2009), and inclusion in Time’s “Time 100” (2006), Smith continues to live and work on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and in the Hudson Valley, shaping contemporary discourse on gender, nature, and the body.