Barbara Lee Smith

In 2015, Smith wrote about the evolution of her work:

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.

In 2000, Smith and her second husband, Mel, relocated to the Pacific Northwest, where they live and work on Raft Island, west of Tacoma, Washington.

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 works on a large scale. In a 2000 review of a Philadelphia exhibition, the James Renwick Alliance Quarterly noted that the works were "breathtaking in scale, particularly Barbara Lee Smith's fused synthetic fabric pilings, the smallest being a mere 7 1/2 feet while the largest was a towering 9 feet." More recent works, pictured in this article, are also large scale.

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 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:

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."

In the late 1960s, Smith moved to Chicago where she resided for three decades near the shore of Lake Michigan. She started teaching contemporary embroidery and design and returned to college in 1970, attending graduate school at Northern Illinois University where she received a MFA degree in mixed media in 1978.

She married soon after graduating in 1959 and, as a young wife and mother, lived on Long Island, New York and then in Levittown, New York. In Levittown she had easy access to New York City where art exhibitions, most notably a Kandinsky show at the Guggenheim Museum, made an impact. During this period she taught herself machine embroidery.

Barbara Lee Smith was born in Camden, New Jersey and grew up in nearby Cape May. Her early interests included music, embroidery and the work of Jackson Pollock who she was first exposed to in a 1949 Life magazine article. Smith majored in home economics at Douglass College (then the women's college of Rutgers University).

Barbara Lee Smith (born 1 April 1938) 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.