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Kiki Smith
Virgin Mary, 1993

Artwork Info

Artwork title
Virgin Mary
Artist name
Kiki Smith
Date created
1993
Classification
sculpture
Medium
bronze and silver
Dimensions
66 in. × 25 1/2 in. × 17 in. (167.64 cm × 64.77 cm × 43.18 cm)
Date acquired
1997
Credit
Collection of Vicki and Kent Logan, fractional and promised gift to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Copyright
© Kiki Smith
Permanent URL
https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/97.868
Artwork status
Not on view at this time.

Audio Stories

Smith on the influence of her Catholic upbringing

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NARRATOR:  

The artist Kiki Smith has a persistent interest in the human body. A motif youll see throughout her work is the écorché, a figure that has been flayed to reveal the muscles underneath the skin. Heres Kiki Smith 

 

KIKI SMITH 

The Virgin Mary, you know, is basically life-size écorché. You know, which is how students traditionally study anatomy, is by building muscle by muscle. You know, and it was about the Virgin Mary and about kind of an insistence of being in the flesh. But it was also about, you know, trying to learn anatomy. I cut channels into the bronze, after it was cast, and—and hammered in silver to—to expose her veins. I think if youre Catholic, you have to think about the Virgin Mary, you know, a lot. And, you know, many of the artists in the eighties and nineties that worked, that made specifically, overtly work about the body, or transgressed, images of the body, were Catholic artists. You know, people at least with Catholic upbringings. In Catholicism, there are very few female deities; theres only the Virgin Mary is the biggest one. She’s our, you know, sky goddess or something like that.

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Other Works by Kiki Smith

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