Thanks to the generosity of a sibling, the New York Public Library (NYPL) is now the owner of some 250 prints by Kiki Smith. They come as the gift of her sister, fellow artist Seton Smith, who has pledged to give all future prints she receives by Kiki to the institution.
The library’s Prints and Spencer Collections already have 30 other Smith prints and 12 of her artist’s books, and with the new gift, including works from as far back as the 1990s and into the present, the library will have one of the most concentrated holdings of the artist’s printed oeuvre in the United States.
“I am very thrilled by my sister Seton Smith’s gift to the New York Public Library because I could think of no more wonderful place for my prints to be,” said Kiki Smith in press materials. “Public libraries are to be cherished.”
The daughter of sculptor Tony Smith, Kiki Smith is a major art historical figure, represented by international gallery Pace, whose founder, Arne Glimcher, mounted a show of her work at his 125 Newbury Gallery in New York just this year. Jan Avgikos wrote in Artforum that in one part of the show, “Smith’s meditations on life and temporality were threaded with wonder at the ineffability of the natural world,” while describing another as “a magnificently gruesome memory theater—one that registered our failure to live together with our own transgressions.”
Smith has appeared in five Venice Biennales, and her work is included in museum collections internationally, from the Albertina in Vienna to the Art Institute of Chicago, the Pompidou in Paris, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
As Nancy Hass wrote in the New York Times in 2018, Smith “has, over the years, woven from glass, bronze, paper, glitter, steel, lead, clay and thread a vast, all-encompassing universe of enchantment, religious ecstasy and personal mythology.”
Smith got her start in the late 1980s and 1990s. Madeleine Viljoen, curator of the NYPL’s Prints and Spencer Collections, said in an email that “Informed by medical texts like Gray’s Anatomy, the works [Smith] produced during this period focused on the human body, featuring often graphic prints of individual organs, blood vessels, cellular forms, and bodily fluids. Rooted in feminism and unfolding against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis, the works consider flesh and the human body with brutal honesty, viewing them as vessels for trauma, mortality, and political autonomy. By the late 1990s, her work began to explore folklore, mythology and religion from a feminist perspective.”
The NYPL will treat the works quite differently from what one might expect at an art museum.
“We see these materials as art but also materials of study,” said Julie Golia, director of the humanities and social sciences research library, in a video conversation. “Anyone can come in with a library card and spend time with these materials, not behind glass but as a researcher. That kind of access is our special sauce here at 42nd Street.”
The NYPL is a partner in Art Week NYC, a citywide gathering celebrating New York’s leading galleries, institutions, and cultural spaces, organized by ARTnews, Art in America, and Artforum. The inaugural event takes place from November 11–14, 2026.