Internationally renowned artist/sculptor Kiki Smith, best known for her abstracted body imagery, will be on campus March 8 - 11 to deliver a public lecture and to participate in the biannual MHC printmaking workshop. A March 9 slide lecture will focus on her work, which is included in the permanent collections of museums from London's Victoria and Albert Museum to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
During the workshop, which is open to Five College faculty and students, she will collaborate with New York City-based professional printer Carol Weaver to create a limited-edition intaglio print. Printmaker and Associate Professor of Art Nancy Campbell established the workshop, an innovative artist-in-residence program, in 1984. For each workshop, a different accomplished woman artist is invited to create art on campus and to serve as an inspiration for students. Elaine de Kooning, Joan Snyder, Vija Celmins, and Sondra Freckelton have each participated.
Born in Germany in 1954, Kiki Smith has been working as an artist in New York since the mid-seventies. Her art "possesses only one constant: an absolute rejection of classic paradigms. Rather than uphold the cool perfection that was the ideal of high modernism, Smith's art is always at least a little messy, open, uncomfortable," writes curator Elizabeth Brown of the University of California at Santa Barbara Art Museum. This seems an apt description of an artist whose work revolves around bodily fluids, intestines, spleens, lungs, livers, and amputated arms and legs--elements of humanity she uses to confront issues of race, gender, age, and class. "When you start making figures, you're in a sense making effigies or you're making bodies," according to Smith. "You're making, physically, bodies that spirits enter or occupy, or that have their own souls, presence, and physical space."
Smith has been commercially as well as artistically successful. Reconstructing the Moon, a 1997 show at Pace Wildenstein Gallery in SoHo, showcased recent pieces in a variety of media, which Steven Madoff of the New York Times described as more "dreamlike" than work of earlier periods. Linked in inventive ways around the theme of the moon, the show included cast-glass birds' nests with eggs, etchings called "destruction of birds," and a statue and drawings of a young girl. "The implication, from nest and egg to diagrammed dead birds, was that the growing child is also part of nature's inevitable cycle," according to Art News. Connected to the other pieces in the show was Smith's painting of the moon on eighty-three panes of opalescent glass installed on shelves from floor to ceiling on the front wall of a gallery.
"We are thrilled that our students will have the opportunity to observe the creative process of an artist of Kiki's caliber," says Campbell. "Kiki does extraordinary work in so many different media--from metal to ceramic to works on paper to installations to blown glass." The workshop will be held daily in the Art Building, from 9 am to 5 pm, while Smith is in residence.
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