This winter, the Kent State University School of Art Collection and Galleries invites the public to experience three compelling exhibitions that span bold contemporary voices, historic printmaking traditions and landmark German Expressionist works.

Kiki Smith's Latest Exhibition: A Journey Through Time and Embodiment

Timothy Taylor is pleased to present an exhibition by Kiki Smith in London, the artist’s fifth solo presentation with the gallery. Spanning from 1997 to the present, the exhibition brings together sculptures and drawings that reflect Smith’s ongoing engagement with the natural world and its connection to mythology, spirituality, and the human condition.

The Obama Foundation has commissioned ten more artists to make works for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, which is scheduled to open in spring 2026. Nine new site-specific pieces will be created by Nick Cave, Nekisha Durrett, Jenny Holzer, Jules Julien, Idris Khan, Aliza Nisenbaum, Jack Pierson, Alison Saar, Kiki Smith and Marie Watt.

"Multidisciplinary artist Kiki Smith visited the Clark Institute of Art last Saturday to discuss her evolving body of work — which spans sculpture, etching, printmaking, photography, drawing, and, most recently, textiles. Her art wrestles with themes of sex, reproduction, mortality, and nature. Her large-scale tapestry, Seven Seas, was the most recent addition to Wall Power!, a special exhibition on show at the Clark until March 9. The exhibition showcases a collection of contemporary French tapestries on loan from the Mobilier national of France."

Published in 1929 after a stay in a sanatorium, "L'Amour la poésie" is undoubtedly the most famous collection by the poet who, five years earlier, had taken part with André Breton in the founding of Surrealism. American artist Kiki Smith has taken up the challenge of the Grande Blanche illustrée collection, where artists confront the greatest authors of literature, to give these fiery poems a new flavor. Her ink drawings on Nepalese paper, where a bird's tail can turn into a rosebush, where sequins become stars at the end of eyelashes, accompany Éluard's poetry of ashes and diamonds, just as the fragile, quivering birds do when they fly around the trees singing. In this way, Paul Éluard's words are given a new life, sensual and shivering, with a flavor as blue as an orange. The poet had warned us: his book is endless.

Kiki Smith, a renowned contemporary artist whose work explores the fundamental themes of human existence, natural cycles and mythological structures, continuously pushes the boundaries of contemporary visual art. Her exhibition "Woven Worlds" (Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro, 21/11/2024 - 21/02/2025) represents a specific artistic narrative in which material and immaterial, historical and contemporary, body and universe intertwine. Through carefully designed compositions, techniques and motifs, Smith builds a complex artistic space, inviting the viewer to think about the relationships between nature, the human body and the collective imagination.

During her over four-decade-long career, contemporary American artist Kiki Smith predominantly explored themes concerning the human body, identity, and feminism. She was one of the first artists to address the AIDS crisis. Smith’s work also explores issues related to the female body and identity. She has challenged traditional depictions of women and their roles in art, by tackling issues such as sexuality, fertility, and the aging process. Smith’s art reflects a broader social and cultural dialogue about gender and social justice.

Spanning over eight decades of artmaking, the works in “Inner Cosmos, Outer Universe”, Pace Gallery, Geneva (15 March–4 May 2024), encompass a broad range of artistic responses to the celestial imagination over the past century, both literally and metaphorically. Recalling the polished chrome and sleek surfaces of space-age design, the exhibition will include sculptures by Alexander Calder, Jeff Koons, Alicja Kwade, and Leo Villareal. Chromatic eruptions course through works by Latifa Echakhch, Sonia Gomes, Hermann Nitsch, Richard Pousette-Dart, and Lucas Samaras, suggesting nebulae that refract spectrums of speckled colour. Other, more oblique references to the cosmos recur in works by Torkwase Dyson, Adolph Gottlieb, Matthew Day Jackson, Robert Longo, Robert Rauschenberg, Arlene Shechet, Kiki Smith, and Mika Tajima, which will also be featured in the show.

The Kiki Smith's exhibition "Woven Worlds" (Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, Feb 21 - Oct 20 2024), organized in close collaboration with the artist, brings together approximately 50 works, central among them her large-format, woven wall tapestries. This series displays plants and animals, celestial entities and bodies of water, as well as Adam and Eve as biblical archetypes, interwoven into a narrative that draws upon the Story of Creation. With great urgency and poetic clarity, these strikingly designed multicolored tapestries – with silver threads, hand-painted, and finished with gold leaf – unite timeless validity with our immediate present.

Kiki Smith’s seventh solo exhibition at Krakow Witkin Gallery began as a way to present the artist’s largest editioned print, “Wooden Moon.” [...] Throughout the show, through drawing, photography, sculpture, and print, the artist’s mastery of processes, historic and contemporary representations of imagery, a deep and vast appreciation for that which surrounds us (in both space and time), as well as a commitment to personal vision all provide an opportunity for appreciation, exploration, and reflection.