This article is part of the Fine Arts & Exhibits special section on the art world’s expanded view of what art is and who can make it.
While still a California housewife with three young children, Barbara T. Smith began in the mid-1960s to take her own creative pursuits more seriously. Having volunteered at the Pasadena Art Museum, she was already hanging out with artists and trading artworks.
Then, she visited Gemini G.E.L., a new printmaking workshop in Los Angeles, to see if she could make a lithograph there.
But Gemini worked by inviting more established artists, so Ms. Smith took matters into her own hands. She leased a Xerox 914 photocopy machine and set up shop in the dining room of her Greene and Greene-designed home.
She began eight months of intense experimentation, copying her own hands, breasts, family photographs and household knickknacks to make prints and bound books. This early experimentation — before many Fluxus artists worked with the medium — was so productive that she described the Xerox machine as a collaborator or even lover. “I could not stop,” she wrote in her 2023 memoir.
Drawing on that memoir and her archives, an exhibition at the Getty Center that ended in July included an actual Xerox 914. Now, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, is featuring more than 30 of her Xerox pieces as part of her largest exhibition yet, “Barbara T. Smith: Proof” through Jan. 14. It ranges from her photocopies and paintings of the 1960s to her body-based and soul-searching performances and installations from the ’70s, ’80s and beyond.
“I’m calling it the year of Barbara,” said Anne Ellegood, director of the contemporary art museum.
Ms. Smith is 92, and the attention has been a long time coming. But it could be good timing, given the current conversation — and recent writing by Rachel Cusk and Jenny Offill, among others — about the practical and existential challenges of making something meaningful of, or during, motherhood.
Ms. Smith did not have the chance to be an artist and a mother for long. As she began pursuing her artwork, her marriage fell apart. In 1968, she granted her husband legal custody of their children to make his trip to Europe with them easier, she said, under the assumption that they would work out a co-parenting agreement. They didn’t.
“I was shattered by the whole thing,” Ms. Smith said from the living room of her Pasadena apartment, with examples of her photocopy-based artwork containing images of her children hanging behind her. An attempt to gain custody in court failed, and she didn’t spend time with her daughters again for 17 years. (She did continue to see her son, who was in boarding school.)
She ended up using her art as a way to process the loss. Enrolled in a new M.F.A. program at the University of California, Irvine, in 1969, she began creating ritualistic performances that explored her limits psychologically, much like her classmate Chris Burden tested himself physically. (Ms. Smith was there for his 1971 performance “Shoot,” where he had himself shot and wounded by a friend with a 22-caliber rifle, and she recorded audio.)
For some performances, she offered her own body, nude, as a canvas to be painted or contemplated. For another, which began in a Las Vegas swimming pool, she recreated an experience of being in the ocean and almost giving up on life, giving in to the currents.
“Making this work gave me a more profound way to talk about my personal dilemmas — and a way of feeling less isolated, knowing I’m not the only one experiencing this sort of grief,” she said.
Not all of her early performances were so cathartic, but many touched on emotional vulnerability, sexual and spiritual growth, and the nurturing power of community. For one performance, “Ritual Meal,” she organized a dinner party that resembled a bizarre surgical experiment, with forceps as forks, test tubes for wineglasses and raw chicken livers to be cooked in boiling red wine on Bunsen burners, all to the loud soundtrack of a heart beating.
Her work also has moments of comic relief. After another dinner party in 1971, which had as its centerpiece a giant Hubbard squash, Ms. Smith said she saw in its emerald green husk glimmers of something good and godly. She built a mold around it and made a resin cast, which became a relic that she ultimately exhibited as the “Holy Squash,” complete with its own shrine and celebrated through dance and performance.
“As a serious parody,” she said in a 2002 video, “we experienced miracles, betrayals, persecutions and conversions.”
Her most notorious performance, “Feed Me,” took place in 1973 from sunset to sunrise in an alternative museum in San Francisco, where she set up a divan with massage oils, cheese and wine spread out nearby. She was naked. A tape of her voice said, repeatedly, “Feed Me.” She had sex with more than one man who attended the event, and much press coverage that followed focused on that. But she emphasizes other details, including massages and conversation.
“I was trying to demonstrate that relationships between men and women were not all about sex, but way more subtle or complex than the culture assumes,” Ms. Smith said. She noted that she guided the interactions that night, unlike Yoko Ono in “Cut Piece” in 1964 or Marina Abramovic in “Rhythm 0” a decade later, who let visitors use tools to act upon, or even harm, their bodies.
Jenelle Porter, who curated the show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, pointed to something else that sets Smith apart from other performance art pioneers like Abramovic and Carolee Schneemann. “One thing that differentiates Barbara for me is that she continually mined her own biography and made work that is not publicity- or market-friendly,” Ms. Porter said, describing how her work resisted formulas stylistically and materially.
Ms. Porter tried to capture that range through the mix of videos, drawings, sculptures and ephemera in the show. “The show is messy — life is messy,” she said.
One of Ms. Smith’s messiest, and liveliest, performances took place when she turned 50 in 1981, marked by her arriving at a Santa Monica, Calif., gallery on her ex-boyfriend’s motorcycle. For “Birthdaze,” as this work was known, she also enlisted the artists Allan Kaprow and Paul McCarthy as performers to help her dramatize the different stages of her intellectual and erotic awakening.
After that, her artwork focused more on social and environmental issues. But she went back to the idea of her life’s journey for “A Meditation on Time” by knitting a white garment in different public places, including several in her hometown, Pasadena, as if knitting her own history together.
The idea was to make a single garment that would never end. But she ended up stopping in 2009, when the knitting was over 40 feet in length, and she now considers herself retired from making art.
“I think of knitting as a device that creates a meditative space,” she said. “The artwork has ended, but the meditation can go on in different ways.”
