Kiki Smith has been known since the 1980s for her multidisciplinary practice relating to the human condition and the natural world. She uses a broad variety of materials to continuously expand and evolve a body of work that includes sculpture, painting, printmaking, photography, drawing and textiles. She is an artist whose work has addressed the themes of sex, birth, regeneration, decay and mortality.
Kiki Smith was born in Germany in 1954, to American parents; her father is the sculptor Tony Smith. She was brought up in South Orange, New Jersey, USA. In 1974 she enrolled at Hartford Art School in Connecticut but dropped out after eighteen months. In 1976 she settled in New York and earned her living over the next few years doing odd jobs. Around 1978 she joined an artists' collective called Collaborative Projects, Inc. (Colab). The collective was dedicated to making art accessible through exhibitions outside the commercial gallery sector. It was during this time that Smith made her first artworks, monotypes of everyday objects. Smith is practically a self-taught artist and describes herself as a thing-maker.
When her father died in 1980, Kiki Smith turned her attention to human corporeality. In 1985 Smith studied to become an emergency medical technician in order to obtain practical knowledge about the human body. The impact of this experience on her work was immediate and profound. The artist's concerns regarding the human form, particularly the female body, placed her artwork at the fore of the battleground for social and political ideologies particularly women's struggle to control their bodies. Her figurative work of the late 1980s and early 1990s confronted controversial subjects such as the AIDS crisis, abortion and gender. Later works have depicted humanity's relationship with nature, focusing on both the vulnerability and savagery of the animal kingdom which echoes the human condition. Smith's work also draws directly on her enduring interest in dolls and marionettes, artworks which allude to the innocence and violence of fairy tales.
Kiki Smith has been the subject of numerous worldwide solo shows including many museum exhibitions. Her work has been featured at five Venice Biennales. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2017 was awarded the title of Honorary Royal Academician by the Royal Academy of Arts, London. The artist has been awarded the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture in 2000; the 2009 Edward MacDowell Medal; the 2010 Nelson A. Rockefeller Award, Purchase College School of the Arts; the 2013 U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts; and the 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center. She is an adjunct professor at NYU and Columbia University. Kiki Smith lives and works in New York.