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.
[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.
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.