Modern and Contemporary Galleries Archives

Object Spotlight: Girl by Kiki Smith

Seattle Art Museum on Nov 6 2025

Now on view at the Seattle Art Museum, Girl (1997) by Kiki Smith is a wax figure on Plexiglas box surrounded by 21 paper drawings created with colored pencils. Ayla Tanurhan, Curatorial Intern for Modern and Contemporary Art at SAM, reflects on the recently-installed artwork.

Girl (1997) by Kiki Smith is a haunting portrayal of profound discomfort at a moment of transition. The piece is in line with Smith’s body of figurative work, often wrought with psychic complexities. Smith’s oeuvre is thematically diverse, drawing inspiration from humanism, feminism, mythology, and Catholicism, as well as lived experience, examining mortality, the life force, decay, and regeneration.

Smith is interested in the body, beginning with a fascination for bodily fluids and organs, and transitioning to a focus on dismembered limbs and whole bodies. Eventually, she lands on the space outside of the body—the natural world. Playing with hierarchy, Smith elevates “lowly” organs like the stomach and subverts representations of the female body, constructing vulnerable, grotesque, and debased bodies, imbued with psychological depth and suffering. These representations of the body can be understood in the greater context of the 80s, when feminist artists reclaimed female figurative work. A clear through line in Smith’s oeuvre: an interest in the life force and life cycles.

Materiality holds sizable significance, as she selects ephemeral, fragile, and sometimes overtly feminine mediums, taunting male critics from early in her career. Her use of bronze—a seemingly permanent material—carries an ephemeral quality, having been continuously melted down and reused throughout history.

Smith constructs Girl during a period marked by a brief transition away from figurative sculpture and towards the cosmos and natural world as subject matter. Though the natural and the figurative unite in the early aughts, a couple of years down the line, the late 90s emphasized subjects like crows, robins, owls, wolves, the moon, the stars, and nature.

So why does this figurative work arrive at this transition point? Girl is best contextualized by Smith’s experimentation with a new visual language and this foray into the natural world. In 1996, Smith participated in a printmaking residency at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, concluding with her installation Landscape (1997).

Girl first appeared in Smith’s solo show Reconstructing the Moon. Considering the visual reference to Puberty, (1894-95), this work arguably addresses the female cycle, one which mirrors the moon’s cycle. In addition to the subject matter, I believe it is important to note the material language. The wax figure and the light-handed drawings on paper slot into Smith’s material tradition—the translucence of the waxy material imbuing the work with a sense of vulnerability.

As Curatorial Intern in the Modern and Contemporary Department, I conducted research on a multitude of works within SAM’s collection. Girl struck me for its haunting yet eerily familiar qualities, permeated with a sense of discomfort and dread, reflecting an emotional state I found recognizable. The grotesque qualities of Smith’s sculptural work enabled a reflection on my initial reaction (one of near disgust) to seeing the building blocks of the body—the fluids and the organs and the limbs—displayed before me.

Smith draws from Thomas Aquinas in her theory, creating a visual metaphor for “our divided selves” through the Frankensteinesque dissection of the body, so the act of viewing and acknowledging this division may allow for healing. In a work like Girl, I recognize a true representation of the human experience. Smith brilliantly unveils these private psychic troubles through the vulnerable sculpture, so we, the viewer, may leave a little more troubled and a little more whole.

—Ayla Tanurhan, Curatorial Intern, Modern and Contemporary

Artwork credit: Wax figure on Plexiglas box with 21 colored pencil on paper drawings, Figure, 43 x 11 x 14 1/2 in. (109.2 x 27.9 x 36.8 cm) Box, 18 x 12 x 8 in. (45.7 x 30.5 x 20.3 cm) Drawings, each 23 1/4 x 27 1/2 in. (59.1 x 69.9 cm), Gift of the Virginia and Bagley Wright Collection, in honor of the 75th Anniversary of the Seattle Art Museum, 2014.25.75

Image credit: Installation view of On Reflection and Modern Art Galleries at Seattle Art Museum, 2025, photo: Chloe Collyer

Object of the Week: Royal Incubator

Elisabeth Smith on Nov 16 2018

Widely regarded as one of the most important American sculptors of the 20th century, David Smith once described his early sculptures of the 1940s and 50s, like Royal Incubator, as “drawings in space.” Smith, a welder, often used wrought and soldered metals such as steel, bronze, and silver, arranged in a highly visual and pictorial arrangement. As explained by art historian Richard J. Williams, “[these sculptures] were really only legible as three-dimensional pictures, albeit abstract ones.”^[1]

Smith’s early work prioritized the act of viewing from a fixed perspective, and while experiencing his pieces in space—and in the round—is important, Royal Incubator’s legibility as a single plane, much like the Cubist paintings of Picasso, is tantamount. In addition to finding influence in Cubism, the dream-like imagery in such early works evidences the heavy influence Surrealism had on Smith. However, thanks to its location installed in Big Picture: Art after 1945, now on view in SAM’s Modern and Contemporary Galleries, Royal Incubator’s association with Abstract Expressionism is also made clear. In many ways, it can be seen as a three-dimensional equivalent to the active, monumental, and gestural paintings by Pollock, Krasner, and Gorky nearby.

Born and raised in Indiana, Smith first worked as a welder and riveter at the Studebaker automobile plant in South Bend. Later, during World War II, Smith worked for the American Locomotive Company, working to fabricate trains and M7 destroyer tanks. These experiences proved formative, advancing his welding skills and relationship with metalwork. Smith’s early works bring together the real, often in the form of found metal scraps, with the imagined, resulting in a unique and at times deeply autobiographical visual style. For example, in Royal Incubator, metal spigots become birds of flight in a dream-like composition that defies clear interpretation.

Delta Air Lines, the Official Airline of the Seattle Art Museum, is a generous sponsor of Big Picture. Their support makes it possible to share this incredible post-war collection with our community.

– Elisabeth Smith, Collections Coordinator

[1] Richard J. Williams, After Modern Sculpture: Art in the United States and Europe, 1965-70 (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2000), 23.

Image: Royal Incubator, 1949, David Smith, steel, bronze and silver, 37 x 38 3/8 x 9 7/8 in., Gift of the Virginia and Bagley Wright Collection, in honor of the 75th Anniversary of the Seattle Art Museum, 2016.17.5 © Estate of David Smith