Kiki Smith at 125 Newbury

“The kids would say I was a witch,” Kiki Smith told Art21 in 2003 while reflecting on her childhood in her father’s house in South Orange, New Jersey. The Smith family home had a gravestone in the front yard bearing the family name. In the attic was a collection of her grandparents’ belongings and a death mask of her grandmother. “In my family there was a kind of morbidity,” Smith recalled, noting that her father, the Minimalist sculptor Tony Smith, told her it was the Irish Catholic in them.

In 2016, I heard Smith speak at Seton Hall University in South Orange during an exhibition with her sister Seton titled A Sense of Place. During the talk, Smith discussed her family’s melancholic relationship to death, joking that some of it may have been shaped by the church the family attended, fittingly named Our Lady of Sorrows. This early familiarity with mortality would later become a defining undercurrent in her work.

In 1980, when her father died, Smith made a death mask of him. Sadly, her sister Beatrice passed away eight years later, from complications related to AIDS. Smith also made a death mask of her. Much of Smith’s work from the 1980s and early 1990s emerges from these profound losses, particularly her sister’s death during the height of the AIDS crisis. “Untitled”, a work from 1990, not included in the exhibition, offers a stark meditation on the time period. The piece consists of twelve mirrored glass water bottles etched with the names of bodily fluids in a Gothic typeface: Urine, Milk, Oil, Saliva, Sweat, Blood, Mucus, Diarrhea, Semen, Tears, Pus, and Vomit.

At a time when HIV was widely understood to spread through bodily fluids, the work reflects the heightened fear and awareness surrounding the body during the early years of the epidemic.

Kiki Smith Untitled (paper figures red walls) 1998

This exhibition highlights an installation from that period alongside more recent bronze sculptures and drawings, allowing viewers to trace the evolution of Smith’s engagement with death. Untitled (paper figures red walls) from 1989 was made a year after Beatrice’s death. The installation features six papier-mâché figures and six large panels of blood-red ink on paper. The pale, nude, life-size paper figures float above eye level, appearing weightless and ethereal, as if personifying the souls of the departed drifting upward. The red panels reference blood, the bodily fluid most closely associated with the transmission of AIDS. In 1989, there was no effective treatment for the disease, and by that year more than twenty thousand people in New York City had died from AIDS, including, the following year, Keith Haring. At the time, these blood-red panels would have elicited an especially visceral response.

Kiki Smith Untitled (Meat Arm) 1992

The only other sculpture from this period included in the exhibition is Untitled (Meat Arm) (1992), modeled from actual meat and cast in bronze, a disembodied arm that appears to be in decay. It is presented alongside a 2025 etching titled Dandelion, which depicts the muscles of a human back stripped of skin. The pairing recalls Smith’s 1992 wax sculpture of a skinless Virgin Mary, flayed like a martyr and shown in 125 Newbury’s inaugural exhibition, Wild Strawberries, underscoring Smith’s sustained interest in vulnerability, sacrifice, and the exposed body.

In the front area of the gallery, a series of recent bird drawings is displayed alongside several large, flat, bronze bird sculptures. The bird sculptures, possibly doves, were produced using the lost-wax casting method and appear to have fractured in multiple places before being welded back together. Raised and discolored areas on the birds’ bodies give the impression that the birds have been wounded or shot. As Smith explains, “They were birds made by drawing into clay, casting in wax, and then bronze. During the bronze process they had many marks upon them, which normally would be chased and disappear, but I decided to keep them.

I decided to keep the marks as evidence of a rupture in our world.” Smith titled three of the sculptures Faith, Hope, and Charity, saying, “I thought Faith, Hope, and Charity are important things to think about at this moment.”

Smith has long incorporated dead animals into her work. Her installation Jersey Crows from 1995 featured numerous dead crows arranged across a gallery floor, and she has produced many prints and drawings of dead animals. The bird sculptures in this installation, however, suggest a shift in tone. They appear wounded, with some possibly dying and others seemingly surviving and healing. One bird lies on the floor, where its wounds have transformed into stars. In an interview with Pace Gallery’s chief curator Oliver Shultz, Smith explains that the bird has become a constellation. Shultz observes that “these birds bear their scars, their stigmata, to us, like St. Francis in Bellini’s painting in the Frick.” Smith titled two of the bird sculptures Columba and Aquila, saying, “both named for the constellations and those are the animals and birds that are disembodied that only live in the realm of the sky.” Possibly reflecting her heritage, Columba is also the name of a sixth-century Irish abbot. In mythology, Aquila, Latin for eagle, is the bird believed to carry the souls of the deceased to the starry heavens. The titles reveal Smith’s careful attention to meaning and her use of titles as a way to guide the viewer toward interpretation.

Whispering Plenty, placed near the entrance of the gallery, is a bowl-shaped bronze sculpture with a wheat motif in low relief on both the interior and exterior of the form. It is a form that Smith has not explored before. She says of it, “In the beginning of the pandemic, I pressed wheat into clay and made wax castings of it. Originally, I wanted to make a concave space for the wall, but then made several flat pieces and in the end two basins, which maybe are like baptismal fonts.” The baptismal font intention of the piece is enhanced by water circulating in the nearby work Star Cluster (Fountain), also from 2025. Intentionally or not, the piece also recalls sculptures of wheat by Italian modernist sculptor Giacomo Manzù, whose wheat sculptures adorn the Door of Death (1961–63) at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. If this relationship is intentional or unconscious, it echoes Smith’s interest in the cycle of birth and death.

Kiki Smith - Hope, 2025
 

Kiki Smith Wooden Moon, 2022 with Arne Glimcher 

Arne Glimcher, founder of Pace Gallery and 125 Newbury, walked us through the exhibition, offering insight into both the works on view and his long relationship with Smith, with whom he has worked for over thirty years. He recounted a story about visiting Tony Smith in the hospital and seeing Kiki and her family waiting there. Glimcher recalled watching Kiki fold and refold a piece of paper she was holding into what he described as “a kind of origami,” which he now views as a portent of Smith’s lifelong engagement with paper as a material. He also shared that he feels a familial connection to Smith, having known and been closely involved with her family for decades.

Now in her sixth decade of art making, Smith approaches death with less confrontation and a more contemplative outlook. The raw physicality and fear that marked her earlier AIDS-era works give way here to transformation and reflective resilience. Smith may not be a witch, as she was taunted as a child, but she is something of an alchemist, taking the earthy materials of paper and bronze and transforming them into something transcendent. As Shultz poignantly writes in the essay accompanying the exhibition, “Although a thread of melancholia runs through all Smith’s art, tragedy always coexists with hope.”