What do our ancestors pass on to us when they leave behind possessions and other physical evidence of their existence? Can these objects serve as a means of communication, reckoning, or generational healing? In Sunny A. Smith’s The Compass Rose, the artist creates a radiant genealogical wheel and a series of art works to navigate the complex legacies of inheritance and lineage – and invites viewers to consider how material things play a role in driving narratives of history, nationalism, family, and the self.

The Compass Rose catalog, designed by McCall Associates, documents the 2023 exhibition with full color plates of new sculpture and media works alongside major pieces never before shown on the West Coast, spanning two decades of Smith’s practice. The publication brings together perspectives from art history, psychology, genealogy, object theory, queer theory, and spirituality through free-ranging conversations between Smith and art historian Glenn Adamson, filmmaker Giselle Bailey, curator Gavin Kroeber, and writer Maud Newton, with an introduction by Fort Mason Director of Arts Programming & Partnerships Frank Smigiel.

The Compass Rose exhibition was on view at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture’s Gallery 308 from January 13 through March 12, 2023. For inquiries on bringing the exhibition to your organization, email info@fortmason.org.

About The Artist. Sunny A. Smith is a queer non-binary artist and educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since the late 1990s, Smith has examined the cultural phenomenon of historical reenactment as the “unresolved acting out of cultural trauma through meticulous handcraft.”

Their 2010 project ARTS & SKILLS Service re-staged a World War II-era collaboration between the American Red Cross and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in which hundreds of Bay Area craftspeople were enlisted to lead hands-on craft workshops for returning GIs.

Smith’s 2013 project Rudiments of Fife & Drum explored the history of American fife and drum music, tracing its roots to the Middle East and reconsidering the emblematic rope tension drum as a communication device, both on the battlefield and during peacetime. They worked with Cooperman Fife and Drum Company to create a series of scaled-up rope tension and frame drums featuring radiant nail-work designs, played by a project band called The Celestial Ancients.

Smith has done numerous projects reflecting their long fascination with trench art, or art made from war relics by soldiers on the battlefield, in hospitals, or prisoner-of-war camps. In 2014, they co-organized “The Curative Object” symposium at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), and in 2016 they curated Source Materiel, a large-scale sculptural installation of the Jane A. Kimball trench art collection, in a former military tank repair building in Santa Fe, NM.

In their 2017 exhibition The Fort, moveable set walls featured the ghostly panoramic interior hearth space of the first dwelling set within the world’s first Living History museum in Stockholm, Sweden. The figure of the scarecrow was crossed with radio tower and antenna-like forms as transmitters of signals and coded messages, serving as scaffolding for traditionally crafted objects by known makers. Smith’s 2017 project Common Goods at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University featured a double-sized Windsor chair, made in collaboration with Boston-based traditional furniture maker Eli Cleveland, who also built a new piece for The Compass Rose.

Smith’s work is held in the collections of the de Young Museum, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the UCLA Hammer Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Saatchi Gallery London, Linda Pace Foundation, and many other public and private collections.

Smith currently serves as Professor and Dean of Fine Arts at California College of the Arts.