page_title: Barbara Lee Smith
section_title: Life and work
hierarchical_section_title: Barbara Lee Smith / Life and work
caption_attribution_description: English: Artist: Barbara Lee Smith 49.5 x 39" Photo by Tom Holt
context_page_description: Barbara Lee Smith is a mixed media artist, writer, educator, and curator. She creates large scale landscapes and abstract works using a three step process of painting, collage, and machine stitching.
context_section_description: Smith has worked as a self-employed studio artist since 1979.  From her work in Chicago, which featured architectural elements, to her work in the Pacific Northwest, with its imagery of land, sea and sky, her work is ethereal and technically adept. In reviewing a 2009 exhibition of Smith's work, Carla Seaquist wrote:  
  In essence a seeker, Barbara's artistic purpose is to retrieve those lost things - meaning, mattering, beauty, wit, a sense of the sacred ... Barbara has been faithful to her inner landscapes. It's why her work resonates so deeply: she shows us profound things the modern world has forgotten but desperately needs.
  Since 1975, her work has been featured in over 25 solo exhibitions in the US, UK, New Zealand and Japan.  She's participated in dozens of invitational group exhibitions including the Bellevue Art Museum Fiber Biennial, Korea Quilt Festival and the Beijing Art Salon. In a review of a 1989 group exhibition on Long Island, The New York Times called Smith's work "off beat and personal."
  ... her work cannot be pigeonholed into any category. The artist sprays uncolored dyes on cotton or silk fabrics. The dyes stain, flow together and mix, but the hues do not become visible until the fabric has been exposed to light. Off Beat and Personal. To add texture, Ms. Smith machine-stitches large areas. Again her approach is off beat and personal. By loosening the bobbin tension and tightening the needle tension the stitching results in a series of loops. Most seamstresses would moan and rip out the threads if this were to happen to their seams, but here the looped stitching is repeated back and forth across an area, until it resembles the glistening pile of a nylon rug. Occasional gold threads, flecked with metallic red and green, scintillate like sparklers. Framed and hung together as a unit of six rectangular modules, the flowing shapes take on an organized interrelationship.
  Smith also contributes to her field through teaching and curatorial work.  From 2000-2005, she served as a visiting professor in the Department of Design and Embroidery at Joshibi College of Art and Design in Tokyo; conducted workshops and lectures at Stik Plus in the Netherlands between 1999 and 2014; and served as a visiting lecturer at Windsor College, England between 1991 and 2004.  She has curated textile exhibitions in Massachusetts, Chicago, New Zealand, and North Carolina.
  Smith authored the book Celebrating the Stitch: Contemporary Embroidery of North America, published by Taunton Press in 1991.  It outlines the movement of embroidery from the home into the artist's studio through a series of interviews with textile artists.  The book includes a range of textile mixed media examples; it also explores creative issues and how to address them.   
  Smith has been honored for her work by the Pierce County (Washington) Art Commission's Career Award, named an honorary member of the Embroiderers' Guild of England, as well as Distinguished Resident by the Ragdale Foundation.  A lengthy 2009 interview with Smith, part of the Archives of American Art Oral History Program, is available from the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art.  Smith writes: "a personal goal has been to help the field of textiles be recognized as a major art form and to see that those who use fiber as their primary medium are recognized within the larger world of art."
  In 2015, Smith wrote about the evolution of her work: 
  Growing up in Cape May, New Jersey brought me into everyday contact with the Atlantic Ocean, and much of my life has been spent finding my way from one coast to the other. The urge to be near salt water infused my work while living in Chicago for many years, and as I finally landed more than fifteen years ago in the Pacific Northwest on a small island in Puget Sound, my work evolved from non-representation images to evocations of the land, sea and sky.
caption: Marshland - Twilight (2010) by Barbara Lee Smith; 49.5" x 39" [private collection] photo by Tom Holt
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