Kiki Smith has been “making things” for as long as she can remember. She recalls sitting at the dining room table of her childhood home in South Orange, New Jersey, along with her twin sisters, assembling geometric paper models for her father, Tony Smith, the noted postwar abstract sculptor and architect. She also made dolls and puppets, and learned how to sew, knit and embroider, developing a lifelong appreciation of craft and domestic handiwork.

Now, at 52, the largely self-taught artist is still sitting at the dining room table making things. The

"Blue Girl," 1998, silicon and bronze.

only difference is that her studio is a townhouse in Manhattan’s East Village, and Smith happens to be one of the most provocative, original artists of our time, enjoying a spectacular midcareer that has culminated in the first full-scale American museum survey of her work. “Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980–2005,” organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, will wind up its national tour this month at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art.

“I’m really just doing the same thing I’ve always done,” Smith says, gluing mica glitter onto a massive lithograph of flowers on handmade Nepalese paper, a work that is destined to become wallpaper. “I like making and embellishing things; it’s a natural impulse. In most places in the world people want to create something beautiful, especially in their homes. It’s a lot about love and being attentive to things. I’m kind of a homebody, a housewife artist.”

There is, indeed, little separation between Smith’s art and life. In her home, hand-colored lithographs of birds and moths on Nepalese paper cover the walls and floors, surrounded by female figures of varying scales and a box of small wax heads. Cast-bronze tables that Smith constructed from cardboard cartons, furnishings by artists Donald Judd and Franz West, and artworks by Rachel Whiteread, Valerie Hammond and Barry Le Va, among other friends, complete the composition.

Best known for her depictions of the human body, Smith has explored many of the same issues preoccupying other contemporary artists, ranging from investigations of narrative and gender politics to meditations on identity, spirituality and the environment. Yet she is unique in her mastery of an astonishing variety of media and materials. Her sculpture shifts effortlessly between paper, wax, glass, plaster, porcelain and bronze (to name a few), sometimes incorporating human hair, embroidered fabric, lace doilies, glass beads and other decorative elements. Prints, collages, photographs, videos and installations also have figured prominently in her prodigious output. And she has been making furniture for decades, often from found furniture parts, fruit crates and liquor cartons.