The Victorian arts of mourning are alive in Kiki Smith’s latest work, as they have been in much of what she has produced since she emerged in the 1980s. Ms. Smith has always operated in close proximity to death; she lost a sister and many friends to AIDS, and has worked as an emergency medical technician.
Kiki Smith: Sojourn, at the Brooklyn Museum, includes “Singer”(2008), in cast aluminum.
At its best, her art is powerfully visceral. But like much Victoriana, it can also be cloying. That’s the main problem with “Sojourn,” at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, Ms. Smith’s first major museum show in New York since a midcareer survey at the Whitney in 2006.
But “Sojourn,” an extended installation that opened on Friday, was actually inspired by a pre-Victorian needlework, Prudence Punderson’s “First, Second and Last Scenes of Mortality,” on loan here from the Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford. This 18th-century piece depicts three stages of a woman’s life: on the right side of the composition, a baby in a cradle is attended by a nursemaid; in the center, a grown woman works on her embroidery; to the left is a coffin with the initials “P. P.”
There are rich ideas in that work, about class and race (the nursemaid in Punderson’s embroidery is black), as well as about death and domesticity. “Sojourn” extracts some of them. But the context of the Sackler Center, with its cryogenically preserved 1970s feminism in the form of Judy Chicago’s permanent installation “The Dinner Party,” does Ms. Smith no favors. It puts her, so to speak, in a narrow box.
To judge from photographs in the catalog, “Sojourn” looked better at the Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld, Germany, where it originated in the spring of 2008 under the title “Her Home.” (It was configured for two other European museums.) Haus Esters, a former private residence designed by Mies van der Rohe, served as a Modernist foil to Ms. Smith’s historical interests. And as an actual house, it made the universal personal.
That sense of domesticity isn’t entirely lost at the Brooklyn Museum, where the installation, organized by the Sackler’s curator, Catherine J. Morris, spills over into two 18th-century period rooms. Ms. Smith also made new work for this version of the show: drawings, a video and large, bobble-head, doll-like figures tethered to strips of muslin.
But if you were less than enchanted by the fairy-tale atmosphere of her Whitney show, you probably won’t like “Sojourn.” Death is sugarcoated with craft: flowers, papier-mâché, antique glass, gold and silver leaf and glitter everywhere. Viewers who aren’t familiar with Ms. Smith’s earlier art about bodily systems and fluids might think that she is merely a maker of pretty, shiny objects.
That’s not to dismiss the drawings here, which are numerous and carry most of the narrative. Done in ink, graphite and colored pencil on wrinkled Nepalese paper, they’re peopled with women of varying age and dress. Some of them are quite affecting, though Ms. Smith’s way of modeling the figure with bunched and twisted lines can grate.
A slim, elderly woman, with close-cropped hair that suggests a serious illness, is a recurring presence. So are several stouter, middle-aged women — the old woman’s daughters, perhaps, or one daughter with different hairstyles.
In several images a younger woman balances precariously on the older one’s lap. The relationship is ambiguous: Is the mother cradling her grown daughter? Or is the younger woman the soul leaving a worn-out body?
Religious and mystical symbolism is prominent, most of it relating to the Immaculate Conception and the Annunciation. Some sculptures and drawings of an androgynous figure with a raised palm take their gesture, and title, from the Annunciation. Birds and birdcages appear throughout as more generic harbingers of resurrection and rebirth.
At the same time, touches of contemporary realism bring Ms. Smith’s women into the secular present. She pays careful attention to clothing, accessories and especially footwear: sneakers, hiking boots and beaded slippers. But it’s still difficult to see past the overweening preciousness of the floral paintings on antique glass and the glitter-dipped light bulbs.
In the final and strongest gallery Ms. Smith resists her tendency to embellish. There, a stark plywood coffin and several intense drawings of a woman on her deathbed bring the cycle to a close. In the drawings Ms. Smith puts her own spin on the 19th-century post-mortem photograph.
You wouldn’t know it from this show, but Ms. Smith’s ideas about death and ritual go well beyond the upper-class drawing room. In interviews, for instance, she has spoken about her love of Egyptian funerary art.
It so happens that the Brooklyn Museum also opened on Friday an exhibition called “To Live Forever: Art and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt.” Spend some time among the male and female mummies, and you may see “Sojourn” in a new light.