UCLA Journal of Radiation Oncology SUMMER 2024 - Flipbook - Page 22
LIGHTNING ROD
K
iki S M I T H
K
I’ve followed Smith’s work closely since I was a teen, and
my admiration for her work has only grown since the days
when I’d cut reproductions for my art journals from art
magazines my father would bring home from the library
discard pile at the college where he taught. And I am not
alone in my fascination. Now 70, she has made a living as
an artist for the past 36 of her 40+ years creating, and her
work is in the collections of dozens of major museums in
the U.S. and around the world.
When getting started in the early-80s, she and her female
peers didn’t have any expectations of being picked up
by galleries, and so they would create their own pop-up
shows. The gallerist Barbara Gladstone later told her that
no one would have expected her to have the career she’s
had. “My work was odd and not 昀椀tting with the time, and
in the end it did 昀椀t in the time with other artists’ work."
The delayed recognition of her work solidly belonging
was bene昀椀cial because she watched peers needing to
maintain continuity, to plan their work a year or years in
advance in order to maintain relevance in a speci昀椀c arena
or genre. “I don’t want to get trapped like that,” she says.
“I don’t want control over my life; I don’t want control
over my work. It isn’t my business where it’s going—my
business is just to show up for it and see what happens.”
Typically categorized as a multidisciplinary artist,
Smith has worked in virtually every medium available to
painters, printmakers, and sculptors. Endlessly curious,
she enjoys working with craftsmen to learn new mediums,
and when she has assistants, they are artists whose
personal strengths Smith taps for her own work. “I like
that everything changes,” she says. “Assistants coming and
leaving. Technology changing. Moving. Things just come
into your life and they o昀昀er you some new experience.”
While she appreciates routine, when she enters her studio,
she isn’t trying to do or be about anything speci昀椀c. “It’s not
about something—it’s about having an experience that
engages you.”
Smith follows impulses, likens herself to a lightning
rod. She tells me that she is often surprised by where a
piece ends up going, the original intention becoming
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Kiki Smith, Untitled (Ribs), 1987 © Kiki Smith, courtesy Pace Gallery
inconsequential. “I don’t have an agenda. I’ve been very
fortunate in my life, but I don’t have an idea of how I’d
like my life to be. I’m very grateful for how it is, but I think
there is something really wonderful about—I think it
comes from my parents—not having to have an agenda.”
It could be argued that Smith has been an artist her entire
life. Her father, the artist Tony Smith, taught and always
worked with assistants—students he would hire as well as
Smith and her sister. “It was an exchange—he was trying
to get something done, but it was very open.” Her mother,
the opera singer Jane Lawrence, told Smith at one point
when Smith asked why she hadn’t dictated more direction
when Smith was a girl that she always thought Smith
would just 昀椀gure it out. “I was raised like a weed,” Smith
notes.
iki Smith is quick to grin in a way that suggests
she’s been caught making mischief, has a beachy
tousle to her long white hair, and her hands 昀氀it as
she speaks. She hops on a Zoom with me from her studio,
the upper 昀氀oor of the house she shares with her husband
in Upstate New York (although she admits that her
husband claims that the entire house is her studio since
pieces migrate downstairs at times).