Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/889110
80 A few days before the late September opening of her Dallas Contemporary exhibition, "Mortal," artist Kiki Smith sits cross- legged on a folding chair in the middle of the gallery, sipping beet juice from Oak Cliff shop Local Press + Brew. Soft-spoken and articulate, the 63-year-old New Yorker recalls heartbreaking moments in her life that have influenced her art: the deaths of her mother, an opera singer; a sister, from AIDS; and her father, Tony Smith, a celebrated sculptor, painter, and architect. Born in Germany but raised on the East Coast, Smith has been the subject of solo shows around the world; she also teaches printmaking at New York University and Columbia University. Much like her portfolio that spans decades, "Mortal" centers on themes of the human life cycle and the body, featuring prints, sculpture, and Pilgrim — more than 20 mouth-blown, stained-glass panels Smith created in Germany, commanding attention throughout the room where each panel nearly kisses the ceiling. Her work is evocative and complex, but Smith's reason for focusing on motifs of birth, love, and death is simple: "It's not like you're trying to get anywhere," she says, "so you just follow where your curiosity takes you." PARENTAL GUIDANCE. Everything revolved either around my father's work or art as a subject. There was not very much of anything else. Later in life, I'm discovering there are other things besides art, but growing up, nothing else held much significance. It was like a mother tongue. It's something I'm very comfortable in. ON PRINTMAKING. I was very attracted to Bread and Puppet Theater when I was young. Besides puppet shows, they made posters and fanzines that they would sell after all of their performances. To me, that was very generative. My father's work was generative in that it was based on octahedrons and tetrahedrons for a great while, then putting those together in different variants. Printmaking is like that — this possibility for repetition and accessibility. Printmaking is a fundamental part of a lot of my work. That then deviates into sculpture and all different kinds of things. THE CREATIVE PROCESS. One tends to meander about. When I first moved to New York, I was trying to learn how to draw. My sister drew still lifes, so I was copying her. Eventually, I started making drawings from Gray's Anatomy, the anatomical book. It's about what is catching your attention. It's some combination between an impetus to do something and some kind of image that you would like to squish that information into. MEDICINE AS ART. I like anatomy. At a certain point, I thought I should become an emergency medical technician because I thought it was a good thing everybody should know — what to do in emergencies with strangers and loved ones. I had such a subjective interest in bodies that I thought it would be good to study. HOW "MORTAL" ARRIVED AT THE CONTEMPORARY. In May, Justine Ludwig asked me to make an exhibition. She said, "[The space in the Contemporary] is 10,000 square feet. Can you make a show?" I was like, absolutely not! I can't do that. Then I thought about this piece, Pilgrim, which I started in 2006 or 2007 and finished in 2010 when I showed it in New York. I originally BODY LANGUAGE BY LINDEN WILSON. PORTRAITS TONY KRASH. Kiki Smith at Dallas Contemporary From left: Kiki Smith's Untitled (Window), 2008, and Annunciation, 2010