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Smith (Barbara T.) papers
2014.M.14
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Title: Barbara T. Smith papers
Date (inclusive): 1927-2012, undated, bulk
1948-2012
Number: 2014.M.14
Creator/Collector:
Smith, Barbara Turner,
1931-
Physical Description:
185.6 Linear Feet
(360 boxes, 9 flatfiles)
Repository:
The Getty Research Institute
Special Collections
1200 Getty Center Drive, Suite 1100
Los Angeles 90049-1688
Business Number: (310) 440-7390
Fax Number: (310) 440-7780
reference@getty.edu
URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10020/askref
(310) 440-7390
Abstract: Barbara Turner Smith (American, born
1931) is one of the most influential figures in the history of performance and feminist art
in Southern California. Her work – which has taken the varied forms of painting, drawing,
installation, video, performance, and artists' books, and often involves her own body –
explores concepts that strike at the core of human nature, including male and female
sexuality, physical and spiritual sustenance, ecology, technology, and death. The archive,
which offers an exceptionally rich resource for Smith's highly personal artistic practice,
contains 160 diaries, 54 sketchbooks, hundreds of drawings, more than 850 vintage prints,
thousands of negatives and contact sheets, approximately 90 films and 1100 audio and video
tapes, in addition to all the notes, plans, and archival records related to her artistic
projects from her student days forward. The archive encompasses not only Smith's career as
an artist, but also her work as a writer, teacher, and advocate of the arts in Los
Angeles.
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described in this inventory through the
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Language: Collection material is primarily in
English with some material in other languages.
Barbara Turner Smith (born in Pasadena, California in 1931) has been at the forefront of
artistic movements in California for over fifty years, particularly in the areas of
performance and feminist art. Her work – which has taken the varied forms of painting,
drawing, installation, video, performance, and artists' books, and often involves her own
body as a vehicle for her art – explores concepts that strikes at the core of human nature,
including male and female sexuality, physical and spiritual sustenance, ecology, technology,
and death.
Smith grew up in a traditional, upper-middle-class Presbyterian family in Pasadena, where
she was expected to embrace the role available to most women in the 1950s – that of wife and
mother. She attended Pomona College, receiving a degree in painting in 1953. She married a
fellow Pomona student in 1951 and spent the rest of the decade raising three children. Smith
suffered from depression after the birth of her first two children and began seeing a
therapist who encouraged her to explore her intellectual interests. In 1960, Smith started
volunteering at the Pasadena Art Museum, where she came into contact with its innovative
director, Tom Leavitt, curator Walter Hopps, and artists such as Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode, Larry
Bell, and later, Allan Kaprow.
In 1965, Smith enrolled in postgraduate courses at Chouinard Art Institute, where her
classes with Conner Everts and Emerson Woelffer were especially influential. Still employing
paint as her medium of choice, Smith executed a series of large black canvases set behind
sheets of glass and contained within aluminum frames. The combination of black paint and
glass created a mirrored surface, such that viewers were confronted by their reflections.
These works demonstrate Smith's sophisticated distillation of minimalism and Light &
Space art, along with her anticipation of more conceptual practices. Concurrently, Smith
produced 38
Coffins – black-bound artists' books produced on
a Xerox machine that she had leased and installed in her living room. She placed objects
such as fabrics, photographs, drawings, foodstuffs and part of her body onto the Xerox
plate. These highly personal and intimate works presage not only Smith's use of the body as
an artistic medium, but also the emergence of both feminism and performance art in Southern
California in general.
The late 1960s were a transformative time for Smith. In 1968, she divorced and soon lost
custody of her children. That same year, she attended a workshop with Alex Hay, an
experimental dancer and member of the ground-breaking Judson Dance Theatre in New York.
Working on Hay's pieces, Smith was encouraged to explore more spontaneous and ephemeral
notions of art. Another participant in the workshop, the collector and artistic entrepreneur
Stanley Grinstein, became the catalyst for Smith's segue into the creation of performances
when he hosted her work
Ritual Meal (1969) at his home.
Sixteen guests were invited to dine and were greeted by an array of costumed characters and
seated amidst the sounds of Smith's pre-recorded voice, an anxious heartbeat, and loud
gongs. Clothed in medical gowns, the guests were then served a six-course meal, but offered
only surgical tools and test tubes with which to eat and drink.
Ritual Meal was followed by other works involving food such as
Mass Meal (1969) and
White Meal
(1971), each of which evoked similar notions of ritual, community, attraction and
disgust.
In 1969, Smith enrolled in the inaugural class of the newly-established MFA program at the
University of California, Irvine. UCI provided an arena in which Smith could explore her
work within a community of like-minded artists. With fellow students Chris Burden and Nancy
Buchanan she formed and ran the non-profit gallery F Space in Santa Ana, which played host
to several of Smith's important early installations and performances, such as
Field Piece (1968-1972) which comprised a bed of 9-foot-tall
translucent resin shafts that resembled enlarged blades of grass. At the prompting of human
weight, a hidden network of cables and triggers caused lights beneath the blades to
illuminate, creating a warm, ethereal glow. Smith's use of industrial materials and
electronics put
Field Piece in direct dialogue with early
examples of Light & Space art. In contrast to the autonomous sculptures of Larry Bell,
Peter Alexander, and her professor, Robert Irwin, Smith's invitation to walk upon, lie upon,
and touch the artwork generated a communal sensory experience, marking
Field Piece as a prominent early example of interactive,
technology-based art.
For her most infamous work,
Feed Me (1973), Smith placed her
own nude body at the center of the piece, as she spent one full night in the bathroom of the
Museum of Conceptual Art in San Francisco surrounded by an array of objects including
perfume, body oils, beads, food, wine, books, items of clothing, and marijuana. One by one,
visitors were invited to enter the charged, temple-like space, greeted by Smith and a
recording of her voice chanting the words "feed me." As numerous scholars have written,
Feed Me turned the tables on the traditional role of women
as objects of art. Embodying the figure of the reclining, passive female nude herself, Smith
constructed a dynamic in which visitors had to conform to a situation she had orchestrated.
This intermingling of sexuality and power continued to factor into much of Smith's
subsequent work.
In the early 1970s, Smith became deeply engaged with the eastern traditions of Buddhism,
Zen meditation, yoga and Tantrism, as well as Native American rituals, shamanism and mystic
practices. These influences appeared in numerous performances, such as
Pure Food (1973), in which the artist meditated in a field for
eight hours, "absorbing only cosmic rays and sound." Other performances in the 1970s tested
the body's limits while also exploring the emergence of performance as a new medium for art.
Smith's engagement with notions of ritual and mysticism continued into the 1980s, and were
joined by an attention to global ecologies, technology and tourism. For the long-term
project
The 21st Century Odyssey (1991-1993), Smith used
nascent video-phone technology to keep in contact with her partner, Dr. Roy Walford, who was
on a two-year assignment within Biosphere 2 in Arizona. Smith travelled to far-flung sites
in countries such as Thailand, India, Nepal, Australia, and Norway, taking on the mythical
role of Odysseus while Walford awaited her safe return.
Barbara T. Smith's legacy must also be considered in tandem with her numerous writings and
her active role as an advocate for Los Angeles-area artists and institutions. Smith has an
important body of critical writings that ranges from early reviews of exhibitions in
Pasadena in the 1960s to articles in prominent art publications such as
Artweek,
Artforum,
LAICA Journal and
High Performance.
In addition to founding F Space, Smith played a key role in several other Los Angeles
organizations. She was a highly active member of the LA branch of Experiments in Art &
Technology, and she was a founding member, with Paul McCarthy and Linda Burnham, of the
Highland Art Agents, a group that organized performance events across Los Angeles. As a
founding board member of the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (LAICA), Smith
channeled her untiring support for new voices into an advisory capacity for the city's first
major space dedicated to contemporary art. Long viewed by other artists as a central figure
in the development of performance, Smith's representation by The Box gallery since 2007, and
her prominent inclusion in nine of the Pacific Standard Time exhibitions from 2011 to 2012,
has advanced the public's understanding and appreciation of Smith's continually evolving
artist career.
This note is drawn from a text compiled by Glenn Phillips, with the assistance of Claire
Rifelj.
The archive is open for use by qualified researchers with the following exceptions: audio
visual materials and data disks are unavailable until reformatted. Film reels F88-F91 are
unavailable pending conservation treatment. Boxes 354-355 are restricted due to fragility;
contact the repository to request digital imaging. Box 64 is sealed due to privacy
issues.
Contact
Library Reproductions
and Permissions
.
Barbara T. Smith papers, 1927-2012, bulk 1948-2012, The Getty Research Institute, Los
Angeles, Accession no. 2014.M.14.
http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cifa2014m14
Acquired in 2014.
Processed by Pietro Rigolo between September 2014 and December 2015.
Selected audio and video recordings are being digitized and made available online. Connect
to
selected audio and video recordings from Series VI.A Personal
and to
selected audio and video recordings from Series VI.B
Projects
.
Barbara T. Smith
Coffin series and related material,
1965-1976 (2013.M.23), comprises a unique set of twenty-five hand-bound artists' books
documenting Barbara T. Smith's experiments with an early Xerox 914 copy machine between 1965
and 1966; and a set of working materials and works related to the
Coffin series.
Scope and Content of Collection
Barbara T. Smith's archive offers an exceptionally rich resource on Smith's highly personal
artistic practice, containing 160 diaries, 54 sketchbooks, hundreds of drawings, more than
850 vintage prints, thousands of negatives and contact sheets, approximately 90 films, 1100
audio and video tapes, in addition to all the notes, plans, and archival records related to
her artistic projects from student days forward. The archive encompasses not only Smith's
career as an artist, but also her work as a writer, teacher, and advocate of the arts in Los
Angeles.
Series I. Personal papers includes Smith's diaries from the 1950s to 2009, her extensive
personal correspondence from the 1950s to 2011 and miscellaneous documents related to
private matters.
Series II. Artworks includes finished and unfinished artworks and related material, such as
artists' books, drawings, paintings, prints, sketchbooks, Xerox artworks and poetry.
Series III. Project files includes documents regarding the production of artworks,
performances and exhibitions, as well as graphic design projects, lectures, symposia,
travels, grant and funding applications, originally arranged together by the artist. It
includes projects Smith participated in or curated, and material as various as photographs,
sketches, drawings, notes, charts, diagrams, storyboards, receipts, correspondence, and
exhibition ephemera.
Series IV. Professional files includes material related to other activities Smith carried
on through decades, most notably teaching, writing, and her role as a prominent advocator
for artists in Los Angeles. It includes a collection of artist files (comprising press
clippings, gallery ephemera, and correspondence), press clippings of articles about or
written by Smith, research files on topics as varied as religions, environment, sexuality
and women's organizations, files regarding her various teaching appointments and the
workshops she organized, and some miscellaneous papers.
Series V. Photographs includes Smith's prints, contact sheets, negatives, transparencies
and slides documenting her projects, her private life, and many topics of interest to her.
Series VI. Audiovisual materials includes a vast personal section comprising Smith's
father's family films, audio recordings of psychic readings and therapy, as well as film
reels documenting daily life. The largest section includes recordings of Smith's
performances, her video works and source materials used in the performances themselves. Many
films and tapes had been copied by Smith in various formats, thus the archive frequently
includes different copies and transfers of the same original film reel or tape. Audio visual
material in this series is unavailable until reformatted.
The collection is arranged in six series: Series I. Personal papers, 1949-2011, undated;
Series II. Artworks, early 1940s-1994, 2003, 2009, undated; Series III. Project files,
1960s-2012, undated; Series IV. Professional files, 1948-2012, undated; Series V.
Photographs, 1959-2009, undated; Series VI. Audiovisual materials, 1927, 1935-1941,
1967-2011, undated.
Video art -- California -- Los Angeles
Installations (Art)
Performance art
Performance art -- California -- Los Angeles
Artists -- California -- History -- 20th century
Artists -- California -- Los Angeles
Artists -- California
Artists -- California -- Interviews
Artists -- California -- Portraits
Artists -- 20th century -- Correspondence
Art, American -- California -- 20th century
Art, American -- California -- Los Angeles -- 20th century
Performance art -- United States -- 20th century
Performance art -- Periodicals
Art, American -- 20th century
Women artists -- Archives
Diaries -- United States -- 20th century
Diaries -- United States -- 21st century
Letters (correspondence) -- United States -- 20th century
Black-and-white prints (photographs)
Gelatin silver prints -- United States -- 20th century
Audiocasettes -- United States -- 20th century
Audiotapes -- 20th century
Video recordings -- United States -- 20th century
Video recordings
Video art -- 20th century
Computer drawings -- California -- 20th century
Sketchbooks -- California -- 20th century
Drawings -- United States -- 20th century
Performance art -- 20th century
Videotapes
Videodiscs (video recording disks)
Videocassettes -- United States -- 20th century
Videocassettes -- California -- Los Angeles -- 20th
century
Videotapes -- United States -- Los Angeles -- 21st century
Videotapes -- United States -- 20th century
Videotapes -- California -- Los Angeles -- 21st century
Floppy disks
Artists books -- California -- Los Angeles -- 20th century
Distel,
Herbert
Baldessari, John,
1931-
Rosenthal, Rachel,
1926-2015
Chicago, Judy, 1939-
Castelli,
Leo
Kaprow,
Allan
McMillan, Jerry,
1936-
Lacy, Suzanne
Smith, Barbara Turner,
1931-
Burden, Chris,
1946-2015
Buchanan, Nancy,
1946-
Cotton, Paul,
1939-
Antin,
Eleanor
Schneemann, Carolee,
1939-2019
Dakin,
Susanna
McCarthy, Paul,
1945-