Conversation with Barbara Smith, Los Angeles, 2003

At the beginning of the conversation, Barbara Smith recounts a two-year odyssey during which her partner participated in the Biosphere 2 project while she worked on a performance piece. “I was going to go around Biosphere 1 the world that we live in.” Smith shares how her travels led her to Norway, where she felt increasingly disillusioned. During this time, she became engrossed in Norse mythology, metaphorically entering the underworld of her ancestry. Smith found herself in a vulnerable position where she had to let go of expectations, realizing that her work was not just the physical product but the act itself.

Early in her practice, Smith engaged in creating alternative versions of religious iconography as a response to the separation of mind and body in Western philosophy. As she explains: “It was about integrating the body, the mind, the spirit, and allowing the woman to have a voice.” Smith’s resin experiments from the 1970s included the casting of a decaying squash in her durational performance titled Holy Squash Ceremony (1971). This feminist statement emphasized cyclical worship practices, aligning with her rejection of hierarchical structures. Furthermore, Smith explains how she worked with the technologies of the time, such as the Xerox machine, creating numerous pieces that adopted the mechanical, repetitive, and accessible form of the medium, in line with her performative approach. “I think of performance as being very embodied and not acting. You’re actually doing something.”
Smith reflects on her involvement with the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles, where she was confronted with her own feminist position. Divisions—particularly between lesbian feminists, radical feminists, and heterosexual feminists—were a source of tension. Smith recalls that “people were afraid to actually confront those differences, because it was important to have solidarity as well.” She also notes that feminist artists who distanced themselves from the intense activist circles of the feminist movement often enjoyed more popular success. This led her to grapple with a difficult decision: whether to focus her energy on her own career or on advancing the feminist cause. “I have a tendency to be torn apart by things. By issues.” Ultimately, she chose to balance both paths.