
Barbara T. Smith: Xerox 914
Curated by Jenelle Porter
Marciano Art Foundation
May 14 to July 5, 2025
Barbara T. Smith, one of Los Angeles’s most persistently experimental and spiritually intrepid artists, receives a long-overdue focus on her earliest forays into machine-based artmaking at the Marciano Art Foundation Library. Barbara T. Smith: Xerox 914, curated by the ever-astute Jenelle Porter, is less a historical footnote than a bracing reminder of how feminist art, conceptualism, and domestic rebellion could converge through something as mundane—and transformative—as a photocopy machine.
From May 14 to July 5, 2025, the exhibition immerses visitors in the heady, analog intimacy of Smith’s Xerox experiments from 1966–67. This was no ordinary Xeroxing. After leasing a hulking Xerox 914 and installing it in her dining room, Smith transformed an instrument of secretarial utility into a portal for poetic and bodily experimentation. Over eight prolific months, she generated some 50,000 prints—layered images of faces, hands, objects, and texts that would become the raw material for books, sculptures, and a kind of proto-performance practice grounded in ritual and reproduction.
The show is a quiet storm of process-based revelation. Presented with a poet’s eye and a sculptor’s touch, the works here speak not only to Smith’s early obsession with modularity and seriality but to her deep belief in iteration as revelation. It’s not hard to see the Xerox machine as a metaphorical womb—its warm hum midwifing poems, forms, and fragments that flirt with erasure as much as clarity. The Library setting feels right: Smith’s work was never just about visuals; it was about communication, the body as archive, the page as altar.
Now 93, Smith has long been revered in the circles that matter—those where performance art, feminism, and mysticism aren’t mutually exclusive. Her archive was acquired by the Getty Research Institute in 2014, and her recent institutional retrospectives have reasserted her influence on younger generations. Yet this show does something else—it brings us back to the beginning, when a woman in Pasadena dared to imagine the copy machine as a collaborator, and through it, charted a new way to be.