Through her explorations of the human body and the natural world, Kiki Smith has confronted in her art the most urgent social and spiritual issues of our day. Direct and accessible, Smith's expressive art engages social and cultural issues in a sometimes viscerally disturbing way. In her recent work, Smith has extended these themes, incorporating rites of passage and cycles of life, death, and rebirth through an iconography of animal, human, and fairy tale imagery.<BR>Now internationally recognized and widely exhibited, Smith is the subject of mid-career retrospective organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and opening at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in November 2005.<BR>Helaine Posner's monograph, published to coincide with the retrospective, is a comprehensive survey of Smith's work in installation, sculpture, and graphic media. She discusses its origins and proposes an interpretive framework, locating it within the artistic traditions that have nourished Smith and tracing its development from the 1980s to the present. An interview with Smith adds the artist's own perspective on the work.