Kiki Smith Quotes

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.

The point isn't to know what you're doing. The point is to have an experience doing something.

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

I trust my work. It's a collaboration with the material, and when it's viewed, it's a collaboration with the world.

Artists live in unknown spaces and give themselves over to following something unknown.

Our culture seems to believe that it's entertaining to teach women to be frightened.

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

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.

One hopes that each piece contains enough space for several narratives.

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.

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.

I really love printmaking. It’s like a mystery and you’re trying to figure out how to rein it in.

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.

It's fun, in a way, to explore what's risky in one's life.

Art is a reflection of everything that impacts your life.

Stained glass enabled the modern world.

If you stick to your work it will take care of you somehow.

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.

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.

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

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

The hardest thing is remembering that you have some complicity in the things that happen to you in your life.

Life changes a lot. I guarantee you.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I didn't start to be an artist myself until I was 24.

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.

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.

When studio art started being seen as important, I joined Colab, and then I became very involved.

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.

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

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

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

I first had no interest in figuration whatsoever.

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

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.

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

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

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

I'm reminded of the arm, and the body, and the appendage.

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.

In drawing, I often think of things as flying buttresses.

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!

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