Smith created a radiant genealogical wheel charting more than 700 direct ancestors across 13 generations, extending back to the early 1600s, when European colonization of North America began. The compass rose – drawn from alchemical diagrams, solar pulsar maps, and maritime motifs – tracks early colonizers, enslavers, and European immigration within Smith’s family lines.

The exhibition featured new sculpture, video, and sound works alongside major pieces spanning two decades, examining how objects construct identity and heritage while obscuring complicated histories. Through traditional crafts – linen-weaving, furniture-making, blacksmithing, woodworking, pottery, and glasswork – Smith built new legacy objects from inherited ones, including an heirloom Irish linen coverlet and a chest of drawers implicated in the Salem Witch Trials.

The project grew out of Another Crossing, which examined the Mayflower voyage’s 400th anniversary and the impacts of European migration on indigenous cultures. Smith traveled to ancestral sites in New England, the Southern U.S., England, Ireland, and the Czech Republic, discovering an ancestor’s blacksmith workshop in rural Bohemia.

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An opening reception was held on January 13, 2023, in Gallery 308, while an artist and curator talk with Smith and curator Frank Smigiel took place on March 11, 2023.

The exhibition was accompanied by a catalog designed by McCall Associates and distributed by D.A.P., featuring conversations between Smith and curator Glenn Adamson, filmmaker Giselle Bailey, and writer Maud Newton on themes of race, kinship, post-traumatic memory, and ancestral healing.

Sunny A. Smith’s The Compass Rose
Exhibition Catalog

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