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

Kiki Smith

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Kiki Smith
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: January 18
Artist
Illustrator
Installation Artist
Painter
Performance Artist
Photographer
Printmaker
Sculptor
Visual Artist
Nürnberg
Ḳiḳi Smit
Art
Beautiful
Firsts
First
Important
Considered
Things
Ugly
Think
Making
Thinking
Often

More quotes by Kiki Smith

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The point of art is that it always has the necessity to expand because people are inherently expanding.
Kiki Smith
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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.
Kiki Smith
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I really love printmaking. It’s like a mystery and you’re trying to figure out how to rein it in.
Kiki Smith
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It's fun, in a way, to explore what's risky in one's life.
Kiki Smith
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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.
Kiki Smith
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The point isn't to know what you're doing. The point is to have an experience doing something.
Kiki Smith
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It was a very economically depressed time [the 80s] and because of that, there was a lot of space. Everything was relatively dilapidated, and one could live on a pretty low income. One could live well below the poverty line and not suffer immensely.
Kiki Smith
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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.
Kiki Smith
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I like that feeling when you’re making art, that you’re taking the energy out of your body and putting it into a physical object. I like things that are labor-intensive : you make a little thing and another little thing and another little thing, and eventually you see a possibility.
Kiki Smith
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When studio art started being seen as important, I joined Colab, and then I became very involved.
Kiki Smith
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Life really changes. And it gets lighter, for the most part. You tolerate yourself and others better.
Kiki Smith
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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.
Kiki Smith
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I like Betsy Ross as a model, too, the quilting bee, sitting around with your friends making art, asking what they think, so that you get the benefit of everyone's opinions and so it's not just about you in your you-dom.
Kiki Smith
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The hardest thing is remembering that you have some complicity in the things that happen to you in your life.
Kiki Smith
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My support system is simple - people and time. The miracle of other people in your life.
Kiki Smith
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I'm in general a nostalgic person, but I don't know if I'm nostalgic for the 80s!
Kiki Smith
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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.
Kiki Smith
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You can have fantasies about having control over the world, but I know I can barely control my kitchen sink. That is the grace I'm given. Because when one can control things, one is limited to one's own vision.
Kiki Smith
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I got into animals by drawing hair follicles. I liked drawing hair, and from that I got into feathers and fur, then into images of animals. The patterning is the same, but the proportions of the body change from one animal to the next. A lot of it is just geometry and consciousness.
Kiki Smith
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Artists live in unknown spaces and give themselves over to following something unknown.
Kiki Smith