Louise Bourgeois was a remarkably prolific and giving artist, who over a lifetime of working created a language — beautiful, organic, sometimes terrifying, sensual, and abstract — that taught you what listening was really about. She was self-sacrificing in her work, which often necessitated an exploration of guilt and shame and littleness, as well as that inherently fraught and awkward business of human interaction. But she went down into the shadows only to climb back up, bearing something to give, every time, and most present in her work is a strong, clear drive for rapport, what she called the “toi et moi”, our need to understand and connect with each other, without which we would be very lost. Her work communicated the universal, but in that strange, particularizing way it was also instantly recognizable as hers. As Bourgeois herself said in 1994, “All our subjects are the same: anything I say would apply to any of us. So, it’s not a mystery. The mystery resides in what you do with it.”

Many Americans are well familiar with Kiki Smith, who came up on the latter end of feminism’s second wave as a member of the activist art collaborative Colab. She achieved prominence a decade later with her major New York exhibition in 1988. Now, at 56, she seems to be at the height of her career. 
     For her most recent site-specific installation at the Brooklyn Museum, Smith takes as her inspiration a remarkable 18th-century needlework from the Federal period by a woman named Prudence Punderson, entitled The First, Second and Last Scene of Mortality. Read from right to left, the parlor room scene depicts three stages of a woman’s life: birth (symbolized by a cradle), adulthood, and death (a coffin). What is rare for a work of that period is that female adulthood is symbolized not by a domestic act, but a creative one — the central figure appears to be drawing. Also unusual is the prominent inclusion of the nursemaid, an enslaved woman of African descent, which raises issues of historical oppression that fall not just along gendered, but also racial lines, and the pressing need for individual as well as creative freedom.