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Kiki Smith Essays

Decent Essays

Kiki Smith is a feminist artist who is known for using the human body and its substances in ways that no other artist has before. “This work displays often grotesque and uncomfortable themes that would usually only be seen in private, however socially suppressed ideas towards things such as defecation and human fragility are often purposely overlooked today.” (Feminist Blog). Some of the issues she displays through art are abortion, AIDS, gender, race and women. Smith is known for using animals, fairytale icons, and other elements of nature in her artwork. She was born in Nuremberg, Germany in 1954. Smith is the daughter of the American sculptor Tony Smith (Art:21). Her family moved to New Jersey where she attended school with her …show more content…

When Smith’s father and sister passed away she also made a death mask of their face and hands so that she could keep them and remember them as they were. Smith started out drawing dead animals when she was young and as she got older started having thoughts of different ways to portray these dead animals. She stated that she had an idea to make Noah’s Ark but have all of the animals dead (Art:21). Smith was also interested in something that was quite the opposite of death, domestic life. She was fascinated with dishes, blankets, cupboards, etc and also used them in her artwork. Smith used her artwork to show her thoughts and feelings on many controversial topics and she made sure that her artwork portrayed exactly what she thought about that certain topic. But she also wanted her art to have an open-ended meaning so that what it meant to her may not be what another person interprets it as (Art:21). She told a story about going to a baptist funeral and seeing ladies in nurses outfits at the door and how much that influenced her and amazed her (Art:21). She then decided to make statues of these ladies because they meant so much to her, even though to other people they may just be ladies with Kleenex, to her they were servants of God. Born is one of Smith’s pieces that she uses a fairy tale to reference a much larger meaning in this case biblical. This is a lithograph that took Smith just about three years to

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