Barbara T. Smith

Barbara T. Smith (b. 1931, Pasadena) is a foundational figure of West Coast performance and body art, whose work since the 1960s has explored food, nurturing, the body, spirituality, sexuality, and death. Her artistic awakening came mid-life: a Pomona College graduate (1953) and mother of three, she leased a Xerox 914 copy machine for her dining room in 1965 and began making radical artist's books tracking her transformation from housewife to artist. After her divorce she entered UC Irvine's first MFA class, co-founding F Space gallery in Santa Ana with Nancy Buchanan and Chris Burden — the space where Burden staged Shoot and where Smith launched her own performance career. Her cardinal works are touchstones of the movement: Ritual Meal (1969), a dinner where guests in surgical scrubs ate raw meat with medical instruments beneath projections of a beating heart; Celebration of the Holy Squash (1971), for which she founded an entire religion around a vegetable husk; and Feed Me (1973), her most famous and controversial durational piece. Deeply engaged with ritual, alternative spirituality, and personal risk, Smith worked with LAICA, Close Radio, and directed the New Gallery at 18th Street Arts Center. Her work has been collected by the Getty, LACMA, MOCA, and the Hammer, and celebrated in surveys including WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution and her ICA LA exhibition Proof.