Modern Movements; Art After 1945; Kiki Smith

     Born to a German Catholic family raised in New Jersey, Kiki Smith uses her history of formalist art, learned from her father, to create beautiful figurative sculptures, drawings, and pieces with different and mixed mediums. Her themes are usually focused around sexuality, birth, and regeneration.

Harbor, 2015 for Woven Tales

Her upbringing in the Catholic church encouraged a recurring theme and fascination with the human form. This coupled with her brief time studying to become an emergency technician further expanded her knowledge of human anatomy. After the death of her sister from AIDS in 1980, she became enamored with death and mortality. This death probed her to make many pieces featuring bodily fluids including blood (relating to the AIDS epidemic), and urine, menstrual blood, and feces (relating to women's rights).
     The picture on the right is a tapestry done by Smith in 2015 for her 2016 exhibition, Woven Tales. The tapestries are 10 feet tall and translate into a story. The pieces are made by first creating large collages from paper drawings, cutouts, photolithographs, and other textured elements. The collages are then photographed, at real size and sent to a third party studio, printed again, and returned to Smith where she continues to layer media. Then, usually after months, when the piece is finished, it is then scanned and translated into a digital weave, and translated into a tapestry by an electronic loom. So cool, I didn't even know such a thing existed!