64+ Kiki Smith Quotes On Education, Art And Government

Kiki Smith is an American artist who works in a variety of media including sculpture, drawing, printmaking, and installation. Her work often focuses on the human body and the natural world, exploring themes of mortality and spirituality. Smith's works have been exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, and are included in the permanent collections of many prominent museums. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Kiki Smith on love, education, life.

Top 10 Kiki Smith Quotes

1. Some people think or expect that you should make the same kinds of art forever because it creates a convenient narrative... I want my work to embody my inherent contradictions.
2. I trust my work. It's a collaboration with the material, and when it's viewed, it's a collaboration with the world.
3. Prints mimic what we are as humans: we are all the same and yet every one is different. I think there's a spiritual power in repetition, a devotional quality, like saying rosaries.
4. It’s one of my loose theories that Catholicism and art have gone well together because both believe in the physical manifestation of the spiritual world.
5. I told the students [at Yale] we were going to talk about love - I meant love in the sense of devotions to one's work - and about half the students got really pissed off.
6. I think that sense of always traveling has something to do with anonymity and privacy and pleasure in having a very clear, very reductive life.
7. It's fun, in a way, to explore what's risky in one's life.
8. Stained glass enabled the modern world.
9. I think that objects have memories. I’m always thinking that I’ll go to the museum and see something and have a big memory about some other lifetime.
10. The hardest thing is remembering that you have some complicity in the things that happen to you in your life.

Kiki Smith Short Quotes

• In drawing, I often think of things as flying buttresses.
• I'm reminded of the arm, and the body, and the appendage.
• When studio art started being seen as important, I joined Colab, and then I became very involved.
• Our culture seems to believe that it's entertaining to teach women to be frightened.
• If you stick to your work it will take care of you somehow.
• I didn't start to be an artist myself until I was 24.
• Artists live in unknown spaces and give themselves over to following something unknown.
• I really love printmaking. It’s like a mystery and you’re trying to figure out how to rein it in.
• The point isn't to know what you're doing. The point is to have an experience doing something.
• One hopes that each piece contains enough space for several narratives.

Kiki Smith Quotes About Life

Sometimes your personal life is much more significant. Sometimes your work life is more significant. Friends and family, or sometimes the general population, take precedence. — Kiki Smith

My iPhone has changed my life - I spend hours taking photos of the sidewalk as I walk down the street. I like the casualness, that it's low-resolution. — Kiki Smith

My support system is simple - people and time. The miracle of other people in your life. — Kiki Smith

The miracle of being able to pay attention to other people in your life, and the miracle of being in time, and to continue being in time. — Kiki Smith

Art is a reflection of everything that impacts your life. — Kiki Smith

As an artist, you want to have an experience. What you need to experience changes over the course of your life because your life changes. — Kiki Smith

I've been very lucky being in New York. While there are many things that have impacted my life, I have been able to stay here and do my own work. — Kiki Smith

Life is much larger than how we image it, always, but society can be constricting in ways. — Kiki Smith

My work life makes much less sense now than 20 years ago. It's Humpty-Dumpty-like in a way; I can't put the pieces back together. — Kiki Smith

Life changes a lot. I guarantee you. — Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith Quotes About Art

I like Betsy Ross as a model, too, the quilting bee, sitting around with your friends making art, asking what they think, so that you get the benefit of everyone's opinions and so it's not just about you in your you-dom. — Kiki Smith

It's just disgusting that in this society, the majority of students in art school are women, but they amount to less than 30% of what is shown in museums. That has not changed radically. — Kiki Smith

Source of inspiration. The MAK is a museum that has had a profound effect on me as an artist and art viewer. — Kiki Smith

In our family, there wasn't anything else besides art. Nothing else in the world existed. My father never spoke about going to a movie or listening to music, other than my mother's singing. — Kiki Smith

I certainly am one of those people who is incredibly privileged to have an art career, which happened out of luck. Then luck kept happening. Besides that, things just move along in their own weird way. — Kiki Smith

Making art is a lot about just seeing what happens if you put some energy into something. — Kiki Smith

I like that feeling when you’re making art, that you’re taking the energy out of your body and putting it into a physical object. I like things that are labor-intensive : you make a little thing and another little thing and another little thing, and eventually you see a possibility. — Kiki Smith

I think making things beautiful is important. But often what's first considered ugly is beautiful, too. — Kiki Smith

I think a lot of making art is listening to yourself. — Kiki Smith

The point of art is that it always has the necessity to expand because people are inherently expanding. — Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith Famous Quotes And Sayings

You can have fantasies about having control over the world, but I know I can barely control my kitchen sink. That is the grace I'm given. Because when one can control things, one is limited to one's own vision. — Kiki Smith

One's self is always shifting in relationship to beauty and you always have to be able to incorporate yourself or your new self into life. Like your skin starts hanging off your arms and stuff, and then you have to think, well that's really beautiful too. It just isn't beautiful in a way that I knew it was beautiful before. — Kiki Smith

I got into animals by drawing hair follicles. I liked drawing hair, and from that I got into feathers and fur, then into images of animals. The patterning is the same, but the proportions of the body change from one animal to the next. A lot of it is just geometry and consciousness. — Kiki Smith

It was a very economically depressed time [the 80s] and because of that, there was a lot of space. Everything was relatively dilapidated, and one could live on a pretty low income. One could live well below the poverty line and not suffer immensely. — Kiki Smith

Prior to my father's death, I was having a hard time committing to a career as an artist, but that's not because of who he was - it was because of who I am. It's true, though, that I felt I shouldn't compete with him, and that those feelings went away after he died. — Kiki Smith

When you get older, you're running out of time. You care more about trying to stay on the planet a little longer, so you can learn how to draw better! — Kiki Smith

I always thought it was a trap to fit into ideologies, and maybe that's a luxury position, but my work is a reflection of my being here. My being here is not a reflection of an idea. — Kiki Smith

Many people don't have relationships to their siblings in adulthood, or they have superficial ones. It's sort of unfashionable, particularly in America, to be close to your family. — Kiki Smith

I have to make about a million proofs of everything. I don’t know, it’s just a repetition, like a meditation. You come back to something and then you leave it, and then you come back again and you leave it, and each time it changes. And sometimes you have to wait for new information inside yourself to be able to finish something, to find out how it should go. — Kiki Smith

I love flying buttresses! — Kiki Smith

Now, it is much more difficult for young people coming to New York. But also when you're young, you have more time to interact with one another, to discover yourself with people of your generation. — Kiki Smith

Things that are very significant and important to you when constructing an identity when you're younger change. — Kiki Smith

I had stopped making figures, and then I began making images of animals in nature, which was a way to introduce the figure. — Kiki Smith

I first had no interest in figuration whatsoever. — Kiki Smith

Life really changes. And it gets lighter, for the most part. You tolerate yourself and others better. — Kiki Smith

It is very different when you age. The things that are significant, or what drives you, or the physical experience of being driven, changes over time. — Kiki Smith

I'm in general a nostalgic person, but I don't know if I'm nostalgic for the 80s! — Kiki Smith

I'm peripheral in Colab's history because others were involved in media, filmmaking, and music, and I was always a studio artist. — Kiki Smith

When I was young, it was an exciting time to be in New York. — Kiki Smith

I'm not moving from an ideological standpoint. Sometimes I'm trying to make my life better. Sometimes I'm trying to make my life worse! I'm trying to find a happy medium that I can make some sense of. — Kiki Smith

We as beings are very contradictory, complicated creatures that work in our best interest and against our best interest. In a certain way, I want my work to have all that messiness. — Kiki Smith

You start with a generic body, but I think the first wall you hit with portraiture is comprised of history and storytelling and the nature of characters - whether they are historical or coming from literature or documentation. Those are the references we have to people, besides your family, and the intimacy of portraiture is in the specifics of individuals. For me, it came out of doing things about animals. — Kiki Smith

As a child I prayed that my calling be revealed - but not with expectation and not with a destination. I became an artist because I didn't know what to do and I thought it was really fun to make things. — Kiki Smith

I always say I'm Catholic - but a cultural Catholic. I wouldn't say I'm a spiritual person, although I pray every day. — Kiki Smith

Life Lessons by Kiki Smith

1. Kiki Smith's work emphasizes the beauty of the human body and the importance of understanding our own mortality.
2. Through her art, Smith encourages viewers to appreciate the fragility of life and to recognize the interconnectedness of all living things.
3. Her work also celebrates the power of the human spirit to overcome adversity and to create beauty in the face of suffering.