The first full-scale American museum survey of the work of artist Kiki Smith will be presented at the Walker Art Center February 26–May 14, 2006. Organized by Siri Engberg, Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker, in close collaboration with the artist,
Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980-2005
includes works in a variety of media—from bronze to beeswax to papier-mâché—and offers a focused look at over 125 objects spanning Smith’s 25-year career. The Walker debuted the exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), where it was on view November 19, 2005–January 29, 2006. An expanded presentation will be shown at the Walker and at subsequent stops at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Celebrating opening weekend at the Walker are a Preview Party with music by Jello Slave and screenings of films about Kiki Smith on Saturday, February 25; and a conversation with the artist and New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl on Sunday, February 26. (Details on these and other related events follow.)
Over the past 25 years, Kiki Smith has established herself as one of the most engaging and original artists of her generation. Best known for her depictions of the human form—both in anatomical fragments and in full figure—she has explored a broad range of subject matter, including religion, folklore, mythology, natural science, art history, and feminism. A remarkable innovator in the arena of figurative sculpture, Smith is also an accomplished printmaker and draftsperson whose work reveals startling possibilities present in unexpected materials. Often employing simple gestures, she has used the body as metaphor to consider the human condition, its strengths and its frailties.
Born in 1954 to Jane Smith, an opera singer and actress, and Tony Smith, a notable postwar abstract artist and architect, Kiki Smith grew up in New Jersey with a steady exposure to the creative process and a personal love of craft and decoration. Her father encouraged Smith and her younger twin sisters Beatrice and Seton to participate in the making of his work, and often hosted fellow artists and friends such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and the young Richard Tuttle as household guests.
After a year at Hartford Art School, Smith settled in New York City in 1976, where she turned seriously to art and supported herself by working variously as a cook, an electrician’s assistant, and a surveyor. Within a few years her underground reputation grew steadily alongside her involvement with Collaborative Projects, Inc. (CoLab), a New York–based artist cooperative. Her art in these early years introduced the body as subject, and reflected her interest in such visual sources as Gray’s Anatomy, a classic text first published in 1858 whose illustrations depict organs as discrete and decontextualized. An untitled plaster cast of a hand and forearm, made in 1980, the year of her father’s death, evidenced the beginnings of her interest in casting the body from life, and also introduced the notion of mortality into her visual thinking, which would continue to be a preoccupation in her work.
In 1985, Smith spent three months training as an emergency medical technician. This led her to consider interior physiology as a subject for her art and to move to a more clinical depiction of the body. Through sculptures and prints, she created a lexicon of often life-size anatomical images—individual organs and parts, lifted from their corporeal context and reinterpreted in unexpected, delicate materials. “I think I chose the body as a subject, not consciously, but because it is the one form that we all share; it’s something that everybody has their own authentic experience with,” she remarked in 1990. Works such as Glass Stomach (1985), an elegant, crystalline vessel; Ribs (1987), constructed of terra-cotta “bones” interlaced with thread and precariously attached to the wall; and Shield (1988), a plaster cast of a third-trimester pregnant belly, are all fashioned from materials that in their vulnerability allude to the fragility of life itself. Other works from this period reveal Smith’s abiding interest in craft. Nervous Giants (1986–1987), a series of muslin panels embellished with embroidered anatomical images; Dowry Cloth (1990), a sensuous and tactile work formed through felting, one of the earliest methods for making fabric; and Lucy’s Daughters (1990), a cluster of stitched and printed dolls, all were made using practices associated with domestic handiwork that have continued to inform Smith’s art to the present.
In the early 1990s, Smith continued to embrace the human body as subject, moving away from her investigations of organs and systems to works depicting the complete figure. Using materials such as beeswax, paper, and bronze, she made a number of pieces—often cast from life—that examined the female form as a site of political and social meaning. Her disarming, anonymous bodies are far from the ideal nudes populating much of art history. Like Smith’s early sculptures, they are at once visceral and dignified, familiar yet discomfiting; they remain quietly introspective in spite of their debased states. Tale (1992), presents a life-size female figure formed in pale beeswax. Positioned on hands and knees as if crawling, the figure excretes onto the floor a long tail of what appears to be feces or intestines. Other works from this period demonstrate Smith’s use of paper as a powerful medium of expression. (Untitled (Blood Noise) (1993) includes sentences written by her sister Beatrice, who died of AIDS in 1988, describing the final symptoms of her illness. The texts hang like streamers from a quilt-like, painted collage of lithographs that form a narrative and symbolic portrait.
Smith’s focus on the female form in her sculpture soon led her to reexamine traditional feminine archetypes from religion, mythology, and folklore. Her depictions were unexpected, as seen in sculptures such as the Virgin Mary (1992), flayed skinless like an anatomical model, her muscles exposed. Smith also depicts women that art history has largely forgotten, such as Lilith, who in various Hebrew legends was Adam’s first wife (and as such refused to submit to a subordinate role), or a vengeful, night-flying demon of the air. Smith cast her Lilith (1994) in bronze, with eerily human glass eyes peering from the dark patina of a body that seems to crawl, insect-like, across the wall. With her portrayals of these icons as inhabitants of physical bodies rather than abstract bearers of social doctrine, Smith created arresting images that contemplate the boundaries between the individual and the universal while suggesting the possibility of a new narrative.
Themes surrounding the natural world have played a significant role in Smith’s art, with many works based on landscape, the cosmos, and the historical and spiritual connections between humans and animals. Smith has incorporated birds extensively in her work, and has also turned her attention to a wide array of creatures she sees as symbolic or significant, frequently depicting wolves, deer, cats, owls, bats, mice, and other animals drawn from the context of religion, literature, and folklore. Some of these works, such as Crèche (1997) and Black Animal Drawing (1996–1998) assemble animals in a menagerie. Other pieces alluding to landscape and natural phenomena consist of accumulations of like objects, as in Mine (1999), a constellation of sharply pointed stars made from delicate Schott crystal; and Flock (1998), a gathering of bird specimens arranged in neat rows to form an invented taxonomy. Smith has long been interested in using the gallery as a space for creating narrative. For the Walker exhibition, she juxtaposes works incorporating subjects from nature with sculpted human figures, emphasizing our intimate and often fragile relationship with the environment.
More recently, Smith has explored storytelling as subject matter, often separating characters from their traditional narratives, as she weaves together elements from fairy tales, folklore and myths to create evocative pieces that invite multiple interpretations. This is often achieved through her use of materials, as in Daughter (1999), a curious and disturbing sculpture of a young Red Riding Hood crafted from Nepalese paper with blue glass eyes that stare from beneath a red cloak. Smith covers the figure’s face in excessive hair, suggesting that she is the daughter of Red Riding Hood and the Wolf. In other works that merge humans and animals, Smith draws on both narrative and art-historical references. Pietà (1999), a self-portrait depicting the artist mourning her dead cat, is rendered in a posture reminiscent of the grieving Virgin Mary. Rapture, a work from 2001, shows a woman emerging from the belly of a wolf, evoking the final scenario from the tale of Little Red Riding Hood, and the broader notion of rebirth.
This exhibition presents a full survey of Smith’s work to date, gathering examples of the broad variety of media she has explored, including sculptures, prints, drawings, photographs, multiples, and installations. Installed with the full participation of the artist, the exhibition unfolds in a loosely chronological fashion, opening with a collection of Smith’s very early body-related works from the 1980s. It continues with large figural sculptures and floor pieces from the 1990s, and closes with more recent work inspired by fairytales and the natural world. In addition, the exhibition features an intimate, artist-curated wunderkammer, or “cabinet of wonders,” a gallery showcasing an eclectic range of both early and recent works, many of which have never been previously shown together. This gallery will be installed largely by Smith herself. The Walker exhibition culminates with a new, room-sized sculptural installation entitled Kitchen (2005), shown recently in Venice, Italy, in which Smith has reimagined this typically domestic space as an artwork informed by art history, traditions of decoration, and her own biography.
In conjunction with the exhibition the Walker Art Center has published a 312-page, fully illustrated catalogue containing critical essays by exhibition curator Engberg, art historian Linda Nochlin, and folklorist Marina Warner, as well as an interview with the artist by novelist Lynne Tillman. The publication features a complete exhibition history and bibliography, and the first-ever comprehensive illustrated chronology of Smith’s life and work. Kiki Smith has contributed a 16-page photographic work entitled Thicket (2005) as an insert in the book. The catalogue is distributed by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., 155 Sixth Avenue, Second Floor, New York, NY 10013, 800.338.2665 (phone), 212.627.9484 (fax), and is available at the Walker Art Center Shop, 612.375.7638 (phone), 612.375.7565 (fax). $65 ($58.50 Walker members)/hardcover; $35 ($31.50)/softcover.
RELATED EVENTS
Opening Weekend
Preview Party
Saturday, February 25, 9 pm – 12 midnight
$24 ($12 Walker members)
Save $1 per ticket when you order online at walkerart.org/tickets.
Join us for a special gathering to celebrate the opening of the exhibition, featuring music by Jello Slave; a screening of the new documentary Squatting the Palace: An Installation by Kiki Smith in Venice by Vivien Bittencourt and Vincent Katz and Kiki in the Flesh by Charlie Ahern; and cash bars and complimentary appetizers by Wolfgang Puck Catering throughout the evening. Receive one free ticket when you join the Walker as a new member. To purchase tickets or memberships, call 612.375.7600 or visit walkerart.org.
Sponsored by Target.
Mack Lecture
Kiki Smith and Peter Schjeldahl in Conversation
Sunday, February 26, 2 pm $20 ($15 Walker members)
Cinema
Over the past 25 years, Kiki Smith has established herself as one of the most engaging and original artists of our time. To celebrate the opening of the exhibition, join the artist and critic Peter Schjeldahl for a conversation about Smith’s work and career. Schjeldahl is an art critic for the New Yorker and has written regularly for Art in America, the New York Sunday Times, and Vanity Fair. This talk will be webcast live and archived at channel.walkerart.org.
The Mack Lecture Series is made possible by Aaron and Carol Mack.
Target Free Thursday Nights
Thursday, March 2
ExhibitionTour, 6 pm
The Artist’s Bookshelf: Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler
Conference Room, 7 pm
Free, but reservations required; call 612.375.7600.
A nine-year-old girl suffering from amnesia discovers, via her shockingly un-human desires, that she is actually a genetically modified, 53-year-old vampire. This unflinching parable examining racism, sexism, and the human body serves as a provocative companion to Kiki Smith’s equally bold take on bodily functions, fairy tales, and mythology. Before the discussion, join the 6 pm tour of the exhibition.
The Artist’s Bookshelf is a book club that focuses on shared themes in contemporary literature and contemporary art.
Books for the Artist’s Bookshelf can be found in the Walker Shop and at the Minneapolis Public Library (http://www.mplib.org). Presented in partnership with the Friends of the Minneapolis Public Library.
Thursday, March 9
Gallery Talk: Siri Hustvedt on Kiki Smith, 7 pm
Meet in the Bazinet Garden Lobby.
Acclaimed novelist Siri Hustvedt is a fiction writer with a sharp eye for visual art. In her book of essays, Mysteries of the Rectangle, she reflects on paintings by such artists as Francisco de Goya, Gerhardt Richter, and Joan Mitchell with the elegant prose of a poet and the scholarship of an art historian. Hustvedt discusses the act of “looking” while touring a selection of pieces in the exhibition.
Café Scientifique
Organizing Life: A New Evolution
Tuesday, March 14, 6–8 pm, Free
Varsity Theater, 1308 4th St. SE, Minneapolis
In the 1990s Kiki Smith expanded her repertoire of images to include the natural world. Pondering the classification of animals and humans, she combines science, history, and myth to create an imaginary system of taxonomy. In conjunction with the exhibition, the Walker and the Bell Museum of Natural History present a Café Scientifique on current scientific thinking about taxonomy, phylogeny, and evolution. Join Bell director/biologist Scott Lanyon for a discussion about the biological relationships among life forms and new thinking in the field. Café Scientifique is a monthly forum for science and culture hosted by the Bell Museum. For more information, visit www.bellmuseum.org or call 612.624.7083.
Target Free Thursday Nights are sponsored by Target. Additional support provided by the Institute for Museum and Library Services.
Gallery Talk
The Creation Stories of Kiki Smith
Sunday, March 19, 3 pm
Free with gallery admission
Meet in the Bazinet Garden Lobby.
A hybrid world of religion and fairy tale surrounds several of Kiki Smith’s sculptures. Christian icons such as the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene serve to reinterpret biblical stories, weaving them into the artist’s imaginary creation story. Join Johan van Parys, director of worship and sacred arts at the Basilica of Saint Mary, for a discussion of the Christian iconography in Smith’s work and her reinterpretation of religious narratives.
Studio Class
Body as Subject
Thursdays, April 6, 13, 20, 27, 6–9 pm, $60 ($45 Walker members)
Star Tribune Foundation Art Lab
Class size is limited. Call 612.375.7600 to register.
Kiki Smith says of her interest in the human body, “It is one form that we all share; it’s something that everybody has their own authentic experience with.” In this four-week class, explore the body-based art of Smith and others by focusing on the human figure as both subject and object of art-making. Through basic movement/meditation exercises, experimentation with two- and three-dimensional media, and discussion, participants will develop a personal vocabulary between the body and tactile materials and complete a self-designed project. No art-making experience necessary. Led by interdisciplinary artist and somatic instructor Britta Hallin.
Gallery Tours
Thursday, March 2
6 pm, Free
Friday, March 3
6 pm, Free with gallery admission
Sunday, March 5
12 noon, Free with gallery admission
Thursday, March 9
6 pm, Free
Friday, March 19
6 pm, Free with gallery admission
Friday, March 10
2 pm, Free with gallery admission
Saturday, March 11
12 noon and 1:30 pm, Free with gallery admission
Sunday, March 12
12:30 pm, Free with gallery admission
Thursday, March 16
1 pm, Free with gallery admission
Thursday, March 16
6 pm, Free
Saturday, March 18
12 noon, Free with gallery admission
Friday, March 24
1 pm, Free with gallery admission
Friday, March 31
6 pm, Free with gallery admission
Sunday, April 2
12 noon, Free with gallery admission
Friday, April 7
1 pm, Free with gallery admission
Friday, April 7
6 pm, Free with gallery admission
Saturday, April 8
12 noon, Free with gallery admission
Thursday, April 13
6 pm, Free
Friday, April 14
1 pm, Free with gallery admission
Saturday, April 22
12 noon, Free with gallery admission
Thursday, April 27
1 pm, Free with gallery admission
Sunday, April 30
12 noon, Free with gallery admission
Friday, May 5
6 pm, Free with gallery admission
Thursday, May 11
6 pm, Free
Sunday, May 14
12 noon, Free with gallery admission
Exhibition Tour
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
November 19, 2005–January 29, 2006
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
February 26–May 14, 2006
Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston
July 15–September 24, 2006
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City
November 16, 2006–February 11, 2007__
