An innovator within the performance art movement of the late 1960s, Barbara T. Smith (b. 1931, Pasadena; lives Los Angeles) has long produced work that explores the self, sexuality, gender roles, physical and spiritual sustenance, love, life, and death. Assembling an expansive range of artwork and performance-related ephemera, Barbara T. Smith: Proof surveys Smith’s bold experimentation. While her groundbreaking performances have received critical attention, the objects Smith has made over nearly sixty years—many for, or as a result of, performances—are less known. This includes the artist’s radical Xerox works, mixed media assemblages, sculptures, artist’s books, drawings, paintings, photographs, and videos. This survey will celebrate Smith’s incomparable contributions to contemporary art, feminism, performance, and technology.
Brown University, with its celebrated Open Curriculum and its encouragement of interdisciplinary faculty and student research and cross-departmental collaboration, is a natural site for presenting Smith’s six decades of work. Barbara T. Smith: Proof marks the first time that a performance artist has been featured in a solo presentation in the Bell's long history, yet the university has a long history of cultivating performance through Brown Art Institute’s IGNITE series; the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies (TAPS); Africana Studies / Rites and Reason Theatre; and the Brown/Trinity Rep MFA Programs in Acting and Directing. Smith’s innovations in melding art, science, and technology – emerging from her collaborations with STEM faculty in southern California – are a powerful example of experimentation across disciplines which we see in action daily at Brown. Finally, Smith’s complicated relationship with the women’s movement and feminist performance art of the 1960s and 1970s is worthy of reappraisal, and contributes to the conversations on gender, sexuality, and the body happening through the Pembroke Center and elsewhere across our campus.
This exhibition builds on notable solo presentations such as Barbara T. Smith: The Way To Be (2023, Getty Research Institute), The Radicalization of a 50s Housewife (2011, University of California, Irvine), and The 21st Century Odyssey Part II: The Performances of Barbara T. Smith (2005, Pomona College Museum of Art). To accompany this singular presentation, ICA LA will publish Smith’s first survey catalogue, co-published by Gregory R. Miller & Co. and designed by Content Object (C/O). Featuring an illustrated chronology compiled by Jenelle Porter and Barbara T. Smith, the catalogue will also include commissioned texts by leading scholars Gloria Sutton, Catherine Taft, and Pietro Rigolo, on, respectively, Smith’s work as it relates to new technologies, ecofeminism, and the archive.
Barbara T. Smith: Proof is organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and guest curated by Jenelle Porter with support from Amanda Sroka, Senior Curator, and Caroline Ellen Liou, Curatorial Assistant. The presentation at the Brown Arts Institute / The David Winton Bell Gallery, part of the Perelman Arts District at Brown University, is organized by Thea Quiray Tagle, Associate Curator.
