Kiki Smith: The Moon Watches the Earth
Portrait of Kiki Smithin her studio© Courtesy Pace Gallery
New York – 125 Newbury is pleased to present Kiki Smith: The Moon Watches the Earth, an exhibition of new and historical works by the renowned American artist Kiki Smith. Curated by Arne Glimcher in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition opened on November 7, 2025 and runs through January 10, 2026. This presentation, which marks Smith’s first solo show in New York City in six years, debuts a series of new bronzes, drawings, and prints produced in recent years alongside sculptural works created during the late 1980s and early 1990s—including a large-scale installation that has not been exhibited in the U.S. for over 30 years. Together, these works sustain a dialogue across three-and-a-half decades of Smith’s practice—an ongoing conversation between past and present—centering on transience and the fragility and joy of embodiment.
Kiki Smith: The Moon Watches the Earth 395 Broadway, NewYork, NY 10013 November 7, 2025–January 10, 2026 Photography courtesy Peter Clough
Since the 1980s, Smith has drawn inspiration for her art from folklore, mythology, history, and the natural world. Even as she has engaged in wide-ranging experimentations with various mediums and materials, in particular paper and bronze, drawing has long remained at the heart of her practice. In the graphic imagery for which she is widely known, Smith often explores the poetic resonance of birds, insects, and other non-human subjects, meditating on the agency of nature both around and within us. At 125 Newbury, Smith debuts a series of new bird reliefs in bronze. In several of these works, she eschews her usual patinated surfaces in favor of raw, unfinished metal, allowing all the marks of the casting process to remain visible like wounds. Smith’s birds are exhibited in conversation with a monumental ink-and-watercolor woodcut, Wooden Moon (2022), which measures 12 feet in width.
Kiki Smith: The Moon Watches the Earth 395 Broadway, NewYork, NY 10013 November 7, 2025–January 10, 2026 Photography courtesy Peter Clough
The exhibition also includes several important historical works by Smith dating to the early 1990s, the period in which she began solidifying her artistic vocabulary. Presented in dialogue with the bronze birds is a site-responsive installation consisting of papier-mâché figures suspended from the gallery’s ceiling. Large monochromatic panels of painted red paper transform the tonality of the room, contrasting with the pallid figures whose shell-like forms appear like bodily envelopes hanging in space. The work makes references to St. Thomas Aquinas’s notion of the separation of matter and form. Smith’s installation, made during the AIDS crisis, has not been exhibited in New York since it was first created. It is presented alongside other earlier works in both paper and bronze, including her visceral sculpture Untitled (Meat Arm) (1992).
Kiki Smith: The Moon Watches the Earth 395 Broadway, NewYork, NY 10013 November 7, 2025–January 10, 2026 Photography courtesy Peter Clough
125 Newbury’s presentation also features several works in various print media. Printmaking is central to Smith’s practice, and its technical processes echo the way she creates her bronze reliefs. Printing, like casting, is a process of transfer. In her cast works, Smith begins with drawing—literally incising the graphic markers into a clay surface. She then covers the entire clay surface with wax, creating a cast of the drawing in wet clay. Other highlights in the exhibition include a new series of bird drawings that seem to alight almost miraculously on the diaphanous surfaces of silk tissue paper. Smith, who had her last major solo show with Pace in New York in 2019, has been represented by the gallery since 1994— Kiki Smith: The Moon Watches the Earth celebrates the nearly four-decade friendship between the artist and Arne Glimcher.
Kiki Smith: The Moon Watches the Earth 395 Broadway, NewYork, NY 10013 November 7, 2025–January 10, 2026 Photography courtesy Peter Clough
Kiki Smith (American, b. 1954, Nuremberg, Germany) is recognized for her multidisciplinary practice through which she explores embodiment and the natural world. The body, mortality, regeneration, gender, as well as the interconnection of spirituality and the natural world are observed through her own personal lens. Her expansive work manifests as sculpture, glassmaking, printmaking, watercolor, photography, and textile, among other art-making forms. Drawn to the cogency of repetition in narratives and symbolic representations, much of Smith’s work is inspired by contemporary and historical visual culture.
Smith has been commissioned to create several permanent installations over the course of her career. In 2010, the Museum at Eldridge Street, New York, housed in the historic Eldridge Street Synagogue, permanently installed Smith’s Rose Window, which she created alongside architect Deborah Gans. In 2022, Smith was commissioned by Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts & Design to create five permanent floor-to-ceiling mosaics for the Madison terminal of Grand Central Station in New York City. Most recently, Smith, in collaboration with Brückner & Brückner Architects, designed an on-site chapel for the Diocesan Museum in Freising, Germany; The Chapel of Mary's Mantle opened to the public on October 7, 2023.
Smith has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions worldwide, including over twenty-five museum exhibitions. Her work has been featured at five Venice Biennales, including the 2017 edition. Among her numerous accolades, awards, and honors, Smith received the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine (2000), was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2005), and was granted the Athena Award for Excellence in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design (2005). She received the Medal Award from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2006), and was recognized by TIME Magazine as one of the “TIME 100: The People Who Shape Our World” (2006). Smith received the Women in the Arts Award from the Brooklyn Museum (2009), the 50th Edward MacDowell Medal (2009), the Theo Westenberger Women of Excellence Award (2010), the Nelson A. Rockefeller Award, Purchase College School of the Arts (2010), as well as the U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts (2013). In 2017, she was elected Honorary Academician by the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
Smith is an adjunct professor at New York University and Columbia University and has lectured extensively at institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2003), The University of Washington, Seattle (2010), and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (2015).
125 Newbury is a project space in New York City founded in 2022 and helmed by Arne Glimcher, Founder and Chairman of
Pace Gallery. Named for the gallery’s original location, which Glimcher opened at 125 Newbury Street in Boston in 1960, the venture is located at 395 Broadway in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood, at the corner of Walker Street. Occupying a 3,900-square-foot ground-floor space in a landmark building with 17-foot ceilings, the interior of 125 Newbury has been fully renovated by Enrico Bonetti and Dominic Kozerski of Bonetti/Kozerski Architecture. Guided by Glimcher’s six decades of pioneering exhibition-making and steadfast commitment to close collaboration with artists, 125 Newbury presents up to five exhibitions per year. Directing and shaping 125 Newbury’s program, Glimcher organizes exhibitions of work by artists—both within and beyond Pace’s roster—who inspire him, often highlighting a specific aspect or focused period of their practice.
Pace is a leading international art gallery representing some of the most influential contemporary artists and estates from the past century, holding decades-long relationships with Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Barbara Hepworth, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, and Mark Rothko. Pace enjoys a unique U.S. heritage spanning East and West coasts through its early support of artists central to the Abstract Expressionist and Light and Space movements.
Since its founding by Arne Glimcher in 1960, Pace has developed a distinguished legacy as an artist-first gallery that mounts seminal historical and contemporary exhibitions. Under the current leadership of CEO Marc Glimcher, Pace continues to support its artists and share their visionary work with audiences worldwide by remaining at the forefront of innovation. Now in its seventh decade, the gallery advances its mission through a robust global program— comprising exhibitions, artist projects, public installations, institutional collaborations, performances, and interdisciplinary projects. Pace has a legacy in art bookmaking and has published over five hundred titles in close collaboration with artists, with a focus on original scholarship and on introducing new voices to the art historical canon.
Today, Pace has seven locations worldwide, including European footholds in London and Geneva as well as Berlin, where the gallery established an office in 2023. Pace maintains two galleries in New York—its headquarters at 540 West 25th Street, which welcomed almost 120,000 visitors and programmed 20 shows in its first six months, and an adjacent 8,000 sq. ft. exhibition space at 510 West 25th Street. Pace’s long and pioneering history in California includes a gallery in Palo Alto, which was open from 2016 to 2022. Pace’s engagement with Silicon Valley’s technology industry has had a lasting impact on the gallery at a global level, accelerating its initiatives connecting art and technology as well as its work with experiential artists. Pace consolidated its West Coast activity through its flagship in Los Angeles, which opened in 2022. Pace was one of the first international galleries to establish outposts in Asia, where it operates permanent gallery spaces in Hong Kong and Seoul, along with an office and viewing room in Beijing. In spring 2024, Pace will open its first gallery space in Japan in Tokyo’s new Azabudai Hills development.
For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit the Pace Gallery’s website here. Pace Gallery can be found on Instagram and Artsy, too.
Kiki Smith: The Moon Watches the Earth opened on November 7, 2025 and will run through until January 10, 2026 at the Pace Gallery 395 Broadway location in New York.
