A fixture on the downtown art scene, Smith has been making influential feminist sculptures and prints since the early '80s.

The daughter of minimalist abstract sculptor Tony Smith and opera singer and actress Jane Smith, Kiki was born in Nuremberg, Germany, and raised in New Jersey. She dropped out of art school at 21, moving to San Francisco to live with the rock band The Tubes. After returning to the East coast, she worked a series of odd jobs (puppeteer, baker, and emergency medical technician, among others) before deciding to take up art seriously in 1980, following the death of her father. Smith's debut solo show was at the alternative space The Kitchen in 1983, but she first attracted serious attention with a show at the Dallas Museum of Art in 1989, which included bottles with bodily fluids and a human fetus displayed along one wall of the gallery.

Smith's early work was preoccupied with the idea of physical dissolution—one of her famous sculptures is a pair of life-size wax nudes of a man and a woman dangling side by side as if crucified, created in reaction to the rise of AIDS, to which Smith lost a sister and many friends. Bodies have continued to dominate Smith's work: A series of recent sculptures with creepy fairy tale associations depict women emerging out of wolves and deer. Smith's pieces, which are fashioned out of materials as diverse as bronze, wax, glass, fiber, and paper, are part of numerous museum collections including the Guggenheim, the Met, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The Whitney was the final stop for a mid-career retrospective in 2006, "Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980–2005," and in 2009 she was awarded the Brooklyn Museum's Women in the Arts award. [Image via Getty]