Barbara T. Smith | |
---|---|
Born | 1931 (age 92–93) Pasadena, California, U.S. |
Alma mater | Pomona College |
Occupation | artist |
Children | 3 |
Barbara Turner Smith (born 1931) is an American artist known for her performance art in the late 1960s, exploring themes of food, nurturing, the body, spirituality, and sexuality. Smith was part of the Feminist Movement in Southern California in the 1970s and has collaborated in her work with scientists and other artists. Her work has been widely exhibited and collected by major museums including the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Hammer Museum, MOCA, LACMA, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Barbara Turner Smith was born in Pasadena, California in 1931. [1] She studied painting, art history and religion as an undergraduate at Pomona College, graduating in 1953. [2] In 1965, after raising three children, she returned to study at Chouinard Art Institute, making The Black Glass Paintings, a series of primarily black surfaces under glass. [3] She received her MFA from University of California, Irvine in 1971. During her time at UC Irvine, Smith and other artists such as Nancy Buchanan and Chris Burden founded F-Space, the experimental art gallery where she launched her career as a performance artist (this is also where Burden’s notorious Shoot (1971) was staged).
Tracking her transition from housewife to artist, [4] Smith's early work focused on collaged photographs of herself and her three children, impressions of portions of her body, and articles of clothing into her self-published photocopied artist books, made on a Xerox 914 that she leased and kept in her living room. [5]
Titles like Broken Heart, Bond, Undies and Do Not Touch suggest the personal nature of her subject matter. As her marriage disintegrated in the late 1960s, autobiography and the creation of a community using interaction with her audience became central to Smith’s art. She began to explore themes of “the body, food, nurturing, female desire, heterosexual relationships, sexuality, religion, spiritual transformation, love, and death." [6]
Smith is best known for her performance work in the late 1960s that was at the forefront of feminist, body, and performance art. Cardinal performances by Smith include: Ritual Meal (1969), a dinner party where guests dressed in scrubs and ate with surgical instruments with footage of the space, nudes, and surgery played overhead; [4] Celebration of the Holy Squash (1971), where Smith created an entire religion out of a vegetable husk, left over from a communal meal; [7] Feed Me (1973), where she sat naked on a mattress in a bathroom during a performance festival with a selection of "food, wine, marijuana, and massage oil", [4] while a looped recording played "feed me"; [4] Birthdaze (1981), performed on Smith's 50th birthday, wherein she enacted her life story in relation to the male avant-garde; [4] and The 21st Century Odyssey (1991–1993), a collaboration between herself and UCLA professor and scientist Roy Walford, a Biospherian and (at the time) Smith's partner. During the performance, she traveled the world and transmitted her performances back to the Biosphere 2, where Walford lived at the time, and the Biospherians responded. [8]
A retrospective exhibition of her work, "The 21st Century Odyssey Part II: The Performances of Barbara T. Smith" was shown at the Pomona College Museum of Art in 2005, and later traveled to the Kennedy Museum of Art at Ohio University. Her Trunk Piece, along with video footage from past performances, were a part of the Orange County Museum of Art's permanent collection exhibition "Art Since the 1960s: California Experiments" (July 15, 2007 – September 14, 2008). [9] Her Field Piece (1968–1972) was the central work of a show at The Box gallery in Los Angeles (November 17, 2007 – January 5, 2008). [10]
In addition to her art practice, Smith has taught courses in performance, art history, sculpture, painting, and drawing at many institutions, including USC, Otis College of Art and Design, UCSD, UC Irvine, UCLA, San Francisco Art Institute, Illinois State University, Ohio State University, and Johnston College at the University of Redlands.
Judy Chicago is an American feminist artist, art educator, and writer known for her large collaborative art installation pieces about birth and creation images, which examine the role of women in history and culture. During the 1970s, Chicago founded the first feminist art program in the United States at California State University, Fresno which acted as a catalyst for feminist art and art education during the 1970s. Her inclusion in hundreds of publications in various areas of the world showcases her influence in the worldwide art community. Additionally, many of her books have been published in other countries, making her work more accessible to international readers. Chicago's work incorporates a variety of artistic skills, such as needlework, counterbalanced with skills such as welding and pyrotechnics. Her most well-known work is The Dinner Party, which is permanently installed in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. The Dinner Party celebrates the accomplishments of women throughout history and is widely regarded as the first epic feminist artwork. Other notable art projects by Chicago include International Honor Quilt, Birth Project, Powerplay, and The Holocaust Project. She is represented by Jessica Silverman gallery.
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Fourteen Rembrandt paintings are held in collections in Southern California. This accumulation began with J. Paul Getty's purchase of the Portrait of Marten Looten in 1938, and is now the third-largest concentration of Rembrandt paintings in the United States. Portrait of Marten Looten is now housed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
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Before [PST], we knew a lot [about the history of contemporary art], and that lot tended to greatly favor New York. A few Los Angeles artists were highly visible and unanimously revered, namely Ed Ruscha and other denizens of the Ferus Gallery, that supercool locus of the Los Angeles art scene in the 1960s, plus Bruce Nauman and Chris Burden, but that was about it. After, we know a whole lot more, and the balance is much more even. One of the many messages delivered by this profusion of what will eventually be nearly 70 museum exhibitions is that New York did not act alone in the postwar era. And neither did those fabulous Ferus boys.
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