Raymond Saunders, Assemblage - Links with Kiki Smith and Louise Nevelson

Take a look at this image of Assemblage. That red rectangle on the left is a piece of oilcloth. There's a Chinese checkers board. There's a chair. There's an article about the Tuskegee airmen. There are two oil paintings. There's a little of this and a little of that. Raymond Saunders collected much of this from the streets on his walks. Two other artists here at Fifty Two Pieces have also collected detritus from the streets. Most recently Kiki Smith in Week 25. And in week 24, we saw the queen of detritus, Louise Nevelson. There are any number of people who pick up "stuff" from the streets -- not all of them make works of art from those little bits and pieces though.

Here's a quote from Raymond Saunders about this method of making art. Each of the objects “finds you; you find it. You become visually receptive, attuned. You take something off the street, not knowing if you’ll use it, or how. I’ll see a sign on a phone pole, walk three blocks thinking about it, go back and get it, take it home and later discard it. Then I ask myself, Why did I ever bother carrying this across town?” So don't think yourself foolish if you pick up "stuff" off the street. You, too, could make art from all of those pieces you bring home. It seems that it's the intention of your act when you're creating that makes it art.

Kiki Smith ~ Crown Point Press

Reading about Kiki Smith has filled my week, not that it hasn't been an otherwise busy one. During the course of the week, I read interviews with Smith and discovered more about her so it seemed appropriate to end with another video, another short one in this instance. Smith is at Crown Point Press and talks about why she makes prints, why she doesn't usually use color – an insight into the artist.

Not often using color is similar to Louise Nevelson, the artist of the week last week here at Fifty Two Pieces. Kiki Smith shares another trait with Nevelson, collecting of detritus from the streets of where she is living. In Smith's case, much of what she collects has to do with death. Death is part of life, the process of our living and that process is part of Smith's work. Some of that may come from her having trained as an emergency medical technician. While that may surprise you, Smith has done quite a few things in life that you might not expect of an artist.

When she graduated from high school she trained as an industrial baker. As she put it when asked why she said "I went to trade school to...well to learn a trade... The idea that I was going to be mopping floors otherwise. Or washing dishes. So I thought at least I'd better get trained to wash dishes." Thankfully Smith realized that baking wasn't what she wanted to do with her life. After a number of other adventures she eventually went to art school because a friend of hers was going. Some of the other things she has done while on her journey to being a famous artist ... a factory worker where she airbrushed patterns onto dresses, as an electrician’s assistant, and as a short-order cook.

Back to the Crown Point Press video posted today. In addition to talking about why she makes prints, we get to see a few shots of the color prints Kiki Smith made while she was at Crown Point. The prints are inspired by the WPA work that was done in the thirties, the time of social realism in the art world of Roosevelt's New Deal. All of this is quite timely with the economic woes of our own time. Here are a few stills from Crown Point from that work...















Two links you might otherwise miss on a search across the internet for all things Kiki Smith. The first is an interview with Joseph Magliaro – click here. He is a superb interviewer and Kiki Smith was quite open with him. The second is a write up of Kiki Smith's 2008 Artist Talk at the University of Pennsylvania. Rachel Fick captures Kiki Smith's rambling personality – click here to have a chuckle.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

What do you call it when you have the same word or idea happen to you often and all at once? It is as if there is a message for you coming from out there. Lately there have been two seperate messages for me. I can't wait to read my horoscope to see if Rob Breszny has picked up on them too. Hopefully you don't miss your reading in the Willamette Week, it is so fascinating- really.
The first message is about The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. My grandfather reccommended this movie to me a few years before he died. It was one of our rare conversations. He was a quiet man and only tended to speak if he had some advice for someone. In this case he told me to see this movie. So I did. Over the course of the last week I have either heard the title or seen it on at least three occasions, including last night as I watched the movie Film Geek.
So here is a bit of it:

The second message is about intention, the word is everywhere I look these days. It is on the tip of tongues. I have been asked more than once what I was intending, and where I intended to go what I intended to say...it is strange, but this clarification is being asked of me.
I don't know if these things are related, but I do intend to rent Umbrellas of Cherbourg and give it another watch.
I write about it now because a few moments ago as I perused the Andy Warhol Museum website for educational programs I came across Kiki Smith's name. Not that she is part of the collection or that she was part of a traveling exhibition or that she goes there as a visitor, but that she was the one artist they mentioned in their aritst in residency program that began 14 years ago in 1995. As I read her name it dawned on me that this was one search this week that wasn't about her, and yet there she was.
I may not have connected Kiki Smith and the Andy Warhol Museum's artist program had it not been that this is Kiki Smith week. I would have passed over that bit of information that is now of interest to me. Her particpation in that endeavor says something important about her.
All things being connected I should mention that unrelated to my search, yesterday's post mentioned Warhol.

Kiki Smith ~ Banshee Pearls

Banshee Pearls (1991), goodness banshee? pearls? What is going on here? Take a look and you’ll see images of Kiki Smith, repeated throughout the 12 prints of this lithographic series. Okay then, it seems to be a fairly ambitious self-portrait. In each one we can see some aspect of this multi-faceted artist, the dark and the light sides of her persona.

Let’s start with the word Banshee. When I first saw one of these individual prints (the last one on the second row) at the Portland Art Museum, it was hanging in the hallway of the lower level of the Hoffman wing directly across from the stairwell at the bottom of the stairs. Banshee was the word my grandmother would use when she would refer to my voice that sounded like a deadly weapon, “if you’re going to scream, do it outside,” she'd say. And pearls, well my great Aunt Pearl was quite a character. The title related for me, but then I discovered that Banshee Pearls had a similar reference for Kiki Smith. Her father, Tony Smith, was ill during all of her childhood and he often told her she was like a banshee - in Irish mythology the female spirit who foretells a death in the family by wailing outside their home. And then, what about Pearls. Pearls can be thought of as organic gems from the sea. But Pearl is also the name of Kiki Smith's grandmother.

The title then does have meaning and reference to the twelve prints. Looking at them without reference to what's represented you can take in the richness of the handmade Japanese paper and look for the aluminum leaf additions to the prints themselves. Beyond that keep in mind that Smith has said that she tries to "-externalize what I'm afraid of." So Banshee Pearls is a bit morbid and gemlike -- the dark and the light sides of the artist, and the series ultimately affirms her many sided identity. One reviewer commented the prints with her image were a "Warholian repetition, interspersed with skulls, and masks that might be from Africa or designed by the Bread and Puppet Theater, the populist street-theater troupe she cites, along with artists like Eva Hesse and Nancy Spero, as an influence."

Smith herself says "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." In this video snippet you'll hear Smith talk of how her work reflects the sum of her experiences and explore the realms of life and death. In addition to being able to hear her voice, you'll also see some other pieces of her work. She's always exploring new process for her work. In the case of Banshee Pearl she used "photographs, photocopies, plates from other prints, and drawings that she made directly onto plates to print multiple images of herself."

Fathers Day for Kiki Smith

Today I want to think about Tony Smith, Kiki's father.I found an article Chuck Close wrote for Time magazine in 2006. In it he writes that Kiki Smith and her twin sisters used to sit at their father's feet making cardboard models for Tony's sculptures. In this one, notice his use of small modular pieces.

Moondog is made of 15 octahedra (polyhedron with 8 faces) and 10 tetrahedra (polyhedron with 4 triangular faces). Kiki would have been 10 years old when this sculpture was made in the 60's. Just a perfect age for sitting below her papa cutting out little cardboard shapes and understanding how wonderfully well they could go together. Moondog has a playful name, which I imagine she also enjoyed. Maybe she even helped name it. Another idea for the name is that it was inspired by Moondog the blind poet who lived on New York City's streets at the time the sculpture was made. Moondog and I have the same birthday, May 26th. He was known as The Viking of 6th Ave.
Kiki takes after her father in her childhood crafting of cardboard shapes. When Tony Smith was a boy he did the same. As a child he had tuberculosis and in order to keep from spreading it spent much time alone cutting little shapes out of medicine boxes and building miniature cities.
I wonder if Kiki played today, with her dad in mind. If she made anything as quirky, tipsy and sweet as Moondog.

Kiki Smith ~ Collaboration with Emily Dickinson and Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

Ray Bradbury once wrote in Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You of the value of reading poetry – it expands how we think and how we see the world. I've taken his advice to read at least one poem a day to heart and have read at least one poem a day since 1982. So this morning I decided to search around for poetry related to Kiki Smith, the artist of the week here at Fifty Two Pieces. Out there on the internet you'll find she has collaborated on at least three books of poetry.

The first, Sampler, is a singularly beautiful and unique publication of Emily Dickinson's poetry published by Arion Press in San Francisco. Sampler is a selection of two hundred poems by Emily Dickinson each paired with a print by Kiki Smith. To prepare for this project, Smith made images of samplers that had been the means young women traditionally used to show their domestic skills . She combed the collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to find examples of this work. Arion Press describes Smith's process to create her prints for letterpress.

The artist Kiki Smith has made prints for every page of the poetry, as well as the half-title page and a portrait of Emily Dickinson on the frontispiece, 206 images in all. These are original prints. Kiki Smith has made the matrix for each image. She scratched lines in the emulsion of photographic negatives with an etching needle and other sharp-pointed tools, thus allowing light to pass through them in the making of photopolymer plates for letterpress printing.

And here is a description of the book, a work of art in itself.

The type and polymer plates were printed by letterpress in black ink for the type and red-brown ink for the plates. The paper was made by hand at the Twinrocker mill. The sheets are hand-sewn with linen thread over linen tapes. The binding has a red-brown goatskin spine, with title stamped in gold, the boards covered with tan cloth, the front cover embroidered with red thread for title and author and artist names. The book is presented in a slipcase.

Goodness, my senses are overwhelmed by the elegance of this work. To read more about the collaborative process used to make Sampler visit Arion Press here.

The other two examples of Kiki Smith's collaborative work with poets are two books published with the poet Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge. Berssenbrugge has a Portland connection. She holds a B. A, from Reed College where she graduated in 1969 after first attending Barnard College in New York.


Endrocinology was published in 1997















and Concordance in 2006.


















To round out this post and to add more poetry to your life here is a video of Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge presenting poetry at lunchtime ...

Saint Genevieve Series

Kiki Smith used the idea of Saint Genevieve to produce a whole series of woman and wolf prints. She portrays Genevieve being born of the wolf, taking shelter with the wolf and here it appears the wolf is attacking Saint Genevieve. "Wearing the Skin" and "Rapture" are the titles of two others in the series.
What exactly is Kiki Smith saying? Little Red Riding Hood has been suggested, a tale about gender anxiety, violence and sexuality.
Personally, I like the sculpture of Rapture she made a few years later, in 2001, shown here.

Kiki Smith ~ Saint Genevieve

Want to hear wolves in the city? Take a trip to the Portland Art Museum. Go early before the crowds. Head to the fourth floor of the Jubitz Center for Modern and Contemporary Art. Exit the elevator and head straight east. You'll soon be walking by wolves, keep walking and go past the female figure staring out at you, and then listen carefully. There it is the sound of howling, baying. What you're hearing are wolves making wolf noises for you as you look back at the woman who is standing confident and listening to the wolves herself.

Made in 1999 by Kiki Smith, this representation of Saint Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris, is a print on Nepalese paper. It is part of a series Smith did in the nineties as she explored Saint Genevieve and the relations between humans and animals. By including sound, she has enriched our experience as we examine the wolves, the birds and this embodiment of feminism. When the other sounds from the floor are silent this work of art is haunting.

Kiki Smith lives in New York, was raised in New Jersey and was born in 1954 in Nuremberg, Germany. She is the daughter of American sculptor Tony Smith. The week promises to be an interesting one as we explore her life and work.