Kiki Smith

American, born Germany, 1954

Constellations

© Kiki Smith / ULAE, Inc.

Image downloads are for educational use only. For all other purposes, please see our Obtaining and Using Images page.

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© Kiki Smith / ULAE, Inc.

Image downloads are for educational use only. For all other purposes, please see our Obtaining and Using Images page.

Constellations, 1996

Artwork Details

Materials

lithograph with collage

Edition:

8/42

Measurements

sheet: 57 1/2 x 31 inches (146.05 x 78.74 cm)

Collection Buffalo AKG Art Museum

Credit

James S. Ely Fund, Gift of Seymour H. Knox, Jr. and the Stevenson Family, by exchange, Charlotte A. Watson Fund, Norman E. Boasberg Fund, Irene Pirson MacDonald Fund and Charles Clifton Fund, 2010

Accession ID

P2010:13

In Constellations, Kiki Smith presents portraits of herself and her twin sisters Beatrice and Seton (Beatrice had died of complications related to AIDS in the 1980s). Their father, Tony Smith, was a renowned Minimalist sculptor, and their mother, Jane, was an opera singer. For them, art was a family affair—one that Smith describes as “morbid” and “eccentric.” “We were the local weirdos,” Smith recalls, “until it became cool and exotic, when I was a teenager, to be from the family of an artist.” About family relationships, she says, “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.” Her subjects’ faces, withered and aged, are marked with patterns suggesting a shared disease; the title of the work may refer to both these topographic features and to the familial bonds shared among the siblings.

Label from One Another: Spiderlike, I Spin Mirrors, March 7–June 1, 2014