Barbara T. Smith (b. 1931, Pasadena) is recognized for her formative role in the development of performance art and her sustained investigation of the intersection between real life and performance through radical, interdisciplinary actions. In 1966, Smith leased a Xerox 914 photocopier and situated it in her Pasadena home, becoming one of the first artists to create artwork with the machine. Over eight months, she produced fifty thousand prints, using the copier as a camera to duplicate her body, household objects, and photographs of her children. Smith capitalized on the Xerox 914's immediacy to test her ideas about art and the self during a period of personal and societal transformation, generating compositions, sculptures, and unique artist's books that explored iteration, modularity, and reproducibility as meditations on passage, process, and the journey between beginning and ending.
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