Kiki Smith's Sister Donates Over 250 Prints to the New York Public Library

The New York Public Library now owns more than 250 prints by Kiki Smith, a gift from her sister, the artist Seton Smith — who has also pledged to donate every future Kiki Smith print she receives to the institution.

The numbers add up fast. The library's Prints and Spencer Collections already held 30 Smith prints and 12 of her artist's books. Add the new gift, which spans works from the 1990s to the present, and the NYPL will hold one of the most concentrated collections of Smith's printed work 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," Kiki Smith said in press materials. "Public libraries are to be cherished."

Who is Kiki Smith?

The daughter of sculptor Tony Smith, Kiki Smith is a major art historical figure. She is represented by Pace, whose founder, Arne Glimcher, mounted a show of her work at his 125 Newbury Gallery in New York this year. Reviewing it in Artforum, Jan Avgikos wrote that in one part of the exhibition, "Smith's meditations on life and temporality were threaded with wonder at the ineffability of the natural world," and described 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. Her work sits in museum collections from the Albertina in Vienna to the Art Institute of Chicago, the Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Writing in the New York Times in 2018, Nancy Hass said 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."

What's in the prints themselves?

Smith emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s, and the early prints reflect that moment. Madeleine Viljoen, curator of the NYPL's Prints and Spencer Collections, explained the arc by email:

"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."

What does this change for the public?

Here's the practical difference: the NYPL won't treat these works the way a museum would. No glass cases, no ticket line.

"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."

That's the mechanism behind the gift's value. A museum holding preserves the prints; a library holding puts them in readers' hands.

The donation also lands as the NYPL prepares for a bigger platform. The library is a partner in Art Week NYC, a citywide event celebrating New York's galleries and cultural institutions, organized by ARTnews, Art in America, and Artforum. Its inaugural edition runs November 11–14, 2026 — a deadline by which the library will have a newly deepened Smith collection to show for it.