Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith is a sculptor and printmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. She creates works in wax, bronze, and other materials that explore human and animal bodies, often depicting internal organs and anatomical forms alongside figures drawn from mythology and folklore.

Kiki Smith makes sculptures where the body turns itself inside out. Organs, bone, skin, blood. In the 1980s and early 1990s, her wax and bronze figures bore witness to loss she had survived—her father's death, her sister's death from AIDS—rendering the body as a site of catastrophe and knowledge. By the mid-1990s she began looking outward, to animals and female figures from folklore and mythology, to the cosmos and the natural world. Now her practice moves across sculpture, printmaking, etching, tapestry, textiles, glass, mosaic. The through-line remains constant: human bodies and animal bodies are inseparable from the systems that sustain them. Each creature holds equal weight. She works on the Lower East Side and in the Hudson Valley.