Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith doesn’t dwell on what she’s doing. She describes herself as a wandering pilgrim, moving outward through life, guided less by strategy than inner impulse. When the work demands something, she responds. She begins by making, by moving, and only later does the form surface, revealing its own direction. Smith likens this to an almost obsolete mode of tinkering: wrapping TV antennas in tinfoil. She’s not pursuing symbolism so much as translating the personal urgencies life hands her, and then filtering them into images that feel real.

Her practice is one of deliberate recurrence. Smith keeps turning the rocks over, returning to older images and remaking them into countless material forms. A key origin: animal drawings from a 1994 residency at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum. From those images, she has produced hundreds of works, iterated across scales and mediums, each version given a separate life through material, size, or surface translation. She gravitates toward printmaking as her primary physical language.

In the 1980s and 1990s, when artistic value systems still enforced a hierarchy of materials, Smith intentionally embraced what others dismissed: quilts, stitch drawings, tie-dyed paintings, the works. These were her early commercial works, the first objects she ever sold. She appreciated their social friction, and refused to be constrained by impositions that privileged one medium over another.