Kiki Smith's Retrospective 'A Gathering' Concludes at Whitney Museum

The traveling exhibition 'Kiki Smith: A Gathering' concludes its US tour at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (November 16, 2006 – February 11, 2007), following presentations at SFMOMA, Walker Art Center, and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Frédérique Joseph-Lowery interviews the artist, exploring her recurring themes of bodily orifices, metamorphosis, and the abject. Smith, born in 1954 in Nuremberg and based in New York, has long interrogated the boundaries of the body through sculptures of glass stomachs, porcelain pelvises, and embroidered skeletons. Her recent turn to crocheted doilies—some centered with nipples or vulvas—recasts orifices as cosmic mandalas. Works like 'Tale' (1992) and 'Rapture' play with fairy tales and bodily fluids, while 'Looking Glass' (2004), created for the Snow Show in Rovaniemi, Finland, featured an ice sculpture of Alice before a 13-meter hole illuminated by Lebbeus Woods. Smith's practice also includes language as secretion, with phrases from her sister's AIDS diary suspended in a large lithograph. The interview touches on her left-handedness, her desire to control every mark, and her refusal to be pinned down like a butterfly. The exhibition is dedicated to her late mother.