"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 exhibition features new sculpture, video, and sound works alongside major pieces never before shown on the West Coast, spanning two decades of Smith’s practice.

The “compass rose” of the exhibition’s title – drawn from alchemical diagrams, solar pulsar maps, and maritime navigational motifs – charts the known names of Smith’s direct ancestors, more than 700 parents stretching back 13 generations to the first wave of European colonization of North America in the early 1600s. Tracking the early colonizers, enslavers, and continuing thread of European immigration within the artist’s family lines, the exhibition gathers together artworks that intervene in these legacies of harm through re-interpretation, re-imagination, and re-making or re-working of tradition. These re-crafted objects – conceived as instruments for magic, time travel, and communication with forebears – include an heirloom Irish linen coverlet and a chest of drawers once implicated in the Salem Witch Trials.

Smith’s work draws on the cultural phenomenon of historical reenactment and the ways traditional crafts are often used in mythologizing narratives of nationalism. Having grown up with a sense of accountability for their predecessors’ roles in North American settlement, the American Revolution, the Antebellum South, and the Civil War, Smith’s work examines the ways that objects construct identity and “heritage” while obscuring difficult histories and facts on the ground.

Smith states, “As an ancestral mapping system, The Compass Rose began as my attempt to see clearly a holistic portrait of myself and my ancestors as people fundamentally not-from-here: immigrants whose origin story is elsewhere. Since the human genome project was completed in 2003, which effectively proved that race is a social construct with no biological basis, DNA and crowd-sourced online technologies have gained in popularity.

The Compass Rose deals with this emergence of human ancestral genealogy as science, as well as new understandings of generational trauma and how it is expressed through the study of epigenetics. Encompassing the last 400-year period of ongoing colonization, I use the project to chart the known harms my ancestors inflicted upon others, as well as those they experienced directly, vicariously, or through moral injury, in order to better understand what I am carrying from the past into the future.”

Smith adds, “Heirlooms – actual, chosen, or adopted – become tools of navigation and ritual, by specifically invoking ancestral trades, forms of folk faith, or other materialities that were close to my ancestors’ lives and would have held deep meaning for them. Made through apprenticeships and collaborations with traditional crafts practitioners, the act of making is in itself then a form of devotion that holds the possibility of reconciliation or repair. Hence, it is fitting that The Compass Rose is situated in Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture’s Gallery 308, a former marine repair shop at a historic point of embarkation.”

The Compass Rose grows out of Smith’s work for Another Crossing, an exhibition that took up the recent 400th anniversary of the Mayflower voyage as a means to reconsider America’s foundational myths and the impacts of European migration on indigenous Native American cultures. In order to examine their own family’s history of settlement and colonization, Smith traveled to ancestral sites in New England, the Southern U.S., England, Ireland, and the Czech Republic. These pilgrimages informed the creation of The Compass Rose, including the discovery of an ancestor’s blacksmith workshop in rural Bohemia. It appears in the show as a panoramic image, transporting the viewer to a hearth that is at once broken down and now reassembled as a possible site of repair.

Through traditional crafts – linen-weaving, furniture-making, blacksmithing, and wood, pottery, and glass work – Smith builds new legacy objects from the inherited ones. The artist takes up the material footprints of family history and forges new connections to Earth, place, trades, and religious or spiritual practices. Within the exhibition, a rare attribute from a Mayflower passenger becomes a “witch hat” for the artist, while a broomstick sourced from an Anglican churchyard in Bicester, England, returns to its pagan roots as a projected mode of transport. The artworks in the show also provide the “instruments” for a new sound piece made in collaboration with artist Lucien Dante Lazar and the “actors” for a new video made with filmmaker Giselle Bailey." -- press release