Kiki Smith
American sculptor and printmaker (born 1954)
Kiki Smith (born January 18, 1954) is a German-born American artist whose work has addressed the themes of sex, birth and regeneration. Her figurative work of the late 1980s and early 1990s confronted subjects such as AIDS, feminism, and gender, while recent works have depicted the human condition in relationship to nature. Smith lives and works on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City, and in the Hudson Valley.
Early life and education
Smith's father was artist Tony Smith and her mother was actress and opera singer Jane Lawrence. Although her work takes a very different form than that of her parents, early exposure to her father's process of making geometric sculptures allowed her to experience Modernism's formal craftsmanship firsthand. Her childhood experience in the Catholic Church, combined with a fascination for the human body, shaped her artwork conceptually.
Smith moved from Germany to South Orange, New Jersey, as an infant in 1955. That same year, her sisters, Seton Smith and Beatrice (Bebe) Smith, were born in Newark, New Jersey. Smith subsequently attended Columbia High School, but left to attend Changes, Inc. Later, she was enrolled at Hartford Art School in Connecticut for eighteen months from 1974 to 1975.
“Kiki Smith” enters the record as american sculptor and printmaker (born 1954). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Kiki, Smith and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q447300. VIAF identifies the subject as 78063391. The Library of Congress control number is n87103853. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1954, 1955, 1974 and 1975.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kiki Smith” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.