For three decades, Barbara T. Smith has been at the forefront of feminist, body and performance art in California, USA. Trained as a painter, Smith began her body-oriented work in 1965. As one of the originators of California performance art scene, Smith worked together with artists such as Nancy Buchanan, Chris Burden, Allan Kaprow, Suzanne Lacy and Paul McCarthy. Her work is aligned with 1970s art practice that explores, among other things, the body and the patriarchal structures within the art world. Her work externalises psychic materials, in the form of mythic rituals that deal with issues of gender, spirituality and sexuality. Smith approaches the intimate, personal and participatory, and often the works evolves into extending over several days.
Barbara T. Smith is a founding member of several artist-run galleries and is Chair of the Performance and Video Programming Committee at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art. She has worked as a curator and organized many panel discussions, performance events and workshops. Smith has also written about other artists' work in various West Coast publications, gave numerous guest lectures and taught in California universities since 1974.
Barbara T. Smith recently had a solo show 'Barbara T. Smith 1965-1972', at Maccarone, New York City (2008). For the exhibition 'Allan Kaprow - Art As Life', Smith reinventedPush and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann (1963), MOCA, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2008). Her work was also part of the exhibitions: 'Art Since the1960s: California Experiments', Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach (2008), 'WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution', The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, curated by Connie Butler (2007), among others.
During the symposium 'Art, the Social and Gender Politics in the 1960s and 1970s', Smith gave the presentation Art, Performance and the Body: Barbara T. Smith and the West Coast scene in the 1960s and 70s, which she discussed her engagement with the West Coast art scene in California, USA during this period, focusing on the new forms of performance art, participation, gender, spirituality and the body.