(Universal Limited Art Editions, 1446 N. Clinton Ave., Bay Shore, NY 11706)
Support: Saunders Waterford HP wove paper
Sheet: 172.9 x 142.5 cm (68 1/16 x 56 1/8 in.); Image: 172.9 x 141.2 cm (68 1/16 x 55 9/16 in.); Framed: 180.3 x 151.1 cm (71 x 59 1/2 in.)
© Kiki Smith
Edition: 28 with 7 artist's proofs and 2 printer's proofs
Did You Know?
Kiki Smith has worked since 1989 with ULAE, the printers who published this work.Description
Kiki Smith is interested in feminist concerns and content, and her most recent work presents myths and fairy tales with subtle feminist revisions. Since 1999 Smith has been preoccupied with “Little Red Riding Hood,” a story of a girl who takes food to her ailing grandmother. In the forest, the girl meets a wolf who, learning her purpose, rushes ahead and devours her grandmother. Little Red Riding Hood meets the same fate when she arrives at her grandmother’s cottage. Born illustrates the episode in which, in some versions of the tale, a hunter saves the girl and her grandmother by cutting open the wolf’s stomach. By representing Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother as standing upright in cloaks, and the wolf as a semicircle, Smith alludes to Old Master paintings depicting the Virgin Mary on a crescent moon. However, Smith rendered both females as self-portraits; thus, the scene also suggests many feminine apprehensions, from adolescent rites of passage to aging. Although best known as the sculptor whose three-dimensional constructions reintroduced the human figure as an important realm for artistic investigation and discovery, Smith also makes printmaking an integral part of her work.
