Christopher Lyon

Kiki Smith

Helaine Posner

Through her explorations of the human body and the natural world, internationally acclaimed artist Kiki Smith has confronted the most urgent social and spiritual issues of our day. Direct and accessible, Smith's expressive art engages social and cultural issues in a sometimes viscerally disturbing way. In her recent work, Smith has extended these themes, incorporating rites of passage and cycles of life, death, and rebirth through an iconography of animal, human, and fairy tale imagery. Helaine Posner's monograph is a comprehensive survey of Smith's work in installation, sculpture, and graphic media. She discusses its origins and proposes an interpretive framework, locating it with the artistic traditions that have nourished Smith and tracing its development from the 1980s to present. An interview with Smith adds the artist's own perspective on the work.

Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.)

Wendy Weitman

John Coletti

Kiki Smith: Prints, Books, and Things is the most complete survey yet of Smith's printed art. Published to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in the winter of 2003-4, it contains 137 color plates documenting her work in the medium, beginning with her first screenprint, made in 1980, and including works that were in progress as this book was being written. Also featured is an eight-page printed work that Smith created especially for the book. An innovative experimenter, Smith has investigated many kinds of printmaking, from traditional techniques such as etching and lithography to newer, simpler processes such as rubber stamp and photocopy, not to mention artist's books and multiples including blankets and fabric dolls. The reader aware of her sculpture will find much to recognize in these works, with their imagery of the body, of animals and birds, and of the iconography of women, but her printed art develops these themes in ways unique to itself - as Wendy Weitman, Curator in the Museum's Department of Prints and Illustrated Books and the organizer of the exhibition, explains in a comprehensive essay. Kiki Smith: Prints, Books, and Things offers a crucial record of an underacknowledged side of Smith's work. In doing so, it argues powerfully for the importance of printmaking in contemporary art.

Prints, Books & Things

Kim Addonizio

Jack Zipes

Francine Prose

Norman Lock

Donna Tartt

Aimee Bender

Kate Bernheimer

Joshua Beckman

Matthew Rohrer

Mary Caponegro

Julie Choffel

Monica Fambrough

Sarah Hannah

Brent Hendricks

Stacey Richter

Marjorie Sandor

Sarah Veglahn

Contains poetry, fiction, and essays that either address the abiding influence of fairy tales on contemporary literature and culture, or are themselves contemporary fairy tales in prose or verse.

The Blue Issue

Fairy Tale Review

David Frankel

Offers a look at the work and life of the American artist who uses such materials as glass, metal, wood, paper, ink, paint, and wax in her work

Have you ever been stuck inside, with nothing to do on a rainy day? Join Samantha and her grandad as they explore how a rainy day can be beautiful and fun!

Beautiful Rainy Day

Me and My Mzee

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

The Lit Cloud

Carsten Ahrens

Published to accompany the exhibition at Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover from 26 September to 15 November 1998.

All Creatures Great and Small

Martin Hentschel

Rosa Maria Malet

Martina Millà

Fundació Joan Miró (Barcelona, Spain)

The Joan Miro Foundation presents "Her Memory," an exhibition by Kiki Smith organised in collaboration with the Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld and the Kunsthalle Nrnberg, containing recent work by this US artist. It could in fact be called an exhibition in progress, since it has been amplified in each venue anterior to the exhibition presented in the Foundation, which is the last location of this tour. Kiki Smith was born in Nrnberg in 1954 to an artistic family: her mother an opera singer and her father Minimalist artist Tony Smith. Her work is characterised by a constant reflection on human existence and on life and death; and her drawings of the human body, which are both traumatic and poetic. She reached international recognition at the end of the 1980s. In 2006-2007, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Whitney Museum in New York organised a touring retrospective exhibition, "Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980-2005," which signalled the end of a period.

her memory : 19 febrer-24 maig 2009, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Linda Nochlin

Siri Engberg

Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, Minn.).

Contemporary arts museum (Houston, Tex.).

Presents a catalog of an exhibition highlighting the works of Kiki Smith, in a volume that also includes critical essays, an interview with the artist, and a chronology of Smith's life and work.

A Gathering, 1980-2005

Kiki Smith's Dowry Book

Nancy Spero

BALTIC, Centre for Contemporary Art Gateshead

Otherworlds accompanies a major exhibition of the work of two American artists - Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith - at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK, from 13 December 2003 to 30 March 2004. They are both prominent artists, from different generations, whose figurative art addresses issues of the feminine across history and mythology. The book explores thematic connections in their work - the female body, myth and fantasy, the "decorative" - and situates them in the context of post-War American art and social movements, as well as feminist and cultural theory. Now in her mid-seventies, Nancy Spero is a respected feminist artist whose practice has greatly influenced a younger generation. Her work on paper and her installations are an acknowledgement of the power of the carnivalesque, and an exploration of the potential recoding of space and architecture through a visual poetics of word and image. Never abandoning the figure, even at a time when images of women were thought to carry only negative connotations, Spero has systematically refigured the feminine as collective, social and empowered. Coming from the generation of artists immediately following Spero, Kiki Smith has always acknowledged a liberating impulse in her art. Both artists have turned vulnerability into strength, making art that represents the female body, but in forms that avoid objectification or narcissism, and that can speak to the universal without idealization or reduction. Both artists make art from the histories, fantasies, legends and myths of the feminine, reclaiming the female body as an expressive vehicle of emancipation and desire. Contributors: Rosetta Brookes, Sylvere Lotringer, Jo Anna Isaak, Marina Warner and Anne Reynolds.

The Art of Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith

Otherworlds

Kiki Smith

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