"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."
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Quote collection
Kiki Smith quotes (page 2 of 4)
64 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"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."
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"I always say I'm Catholic - but a cultural Catholic. I wouldn't say I'm a spiritual person, although I pray every day."
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"Life is much larger than how we image it, always, but society can be constricting in ways."
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"The hardest thing is remembering that you have some complicity in the things that happen to you in your life."
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"I have to make about a million proofs of everything. I don’t know, it’s just a repetition, like a meditation. You come back to something and then you leave it, and then you come back again and you leave it, and each time it changes. And sometimes you have to wait for new information inside yourself to be able to finish something, to find out how it should go."
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"Life changes a lot. I guarantee you."
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"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."
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"I certainly am one of those people who is incredibly privileged to have an art career, which happened out of luck. Then luck kept happening. Besides that, things just move along in their own weird way."
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"As a child I prayed that my calling be revealed - but not with expectation and not with a destination. I became an artist because I didn't know what to do and I thought it was really fun to make things."
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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."
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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."
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"Prior to my father's death, I was having a hard time committing to a career as an artist, but that's not because of who he was - it was because of who I am. It's true, though, that I felt I shouldn't compete with him, and that those feelings went away after he died."
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"Source of inspiration. The MAK is a museum that has had a profound effect on me as an artist and art viewer."
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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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"When I was young, it was an exciting time to be in New York."
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"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."
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