Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Sculpture, Social Practice, Craft
Website: sunnyasmith.com
Sunny A. Smith (they/them) was born in 1972 in Manassas, Virginia, and studied psychology at Eugene Lang College at the New School for Social Research before earning a BFA in sculpture from Parsons School of Design and an MFA in sculpture from Yale University School of Art, followed by a residency in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. Smith lived and worked in New York City for nearly two decades, serving as a museum educator at the Whitney and as adjunct faculty at Columbia University, Parsons, and New York University, before relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2008 to join the faculty of California College of the Arts (CCA). At CCA, Smith rose from assistant professor to Chair of the Sculpture Program, tenured Associate Professor, and ultimately Dean of Fine Arts (2018-2025). In August 2025, Smith became Executive Director and CEO of Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, the country’s first and largest nonprofit art studio for artists with developmental disabilities.
Working for much of their career under the name Allison Smith, Smith has exhibited professionally since 1995 across the United States and internationally, including in England, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, New Zealand, and South Korea. Their work has been shown at P.S.1/MoMA, SFMOMA, the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, MASS MoCA, and the Palais de Tokyo, and is held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Saatchi Gallery, London. Smith’s honors include a United States Artists Fellowship, an Artadia Award, grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, a Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship, and residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, and IASPIS in Stockholm.
Smith describes themself as “a conceptual artist whose subject is craft.” Their practice combines social practice, performance, and craft-based sculpture to investigate how history, particularly American history, is constructed, remembered, and contested. Recurring strategies include large-scale participatory reenactments, handmade textiles and traditional crafts such as linen-weaving, blacksmithing, woodworking, ceramics, and glasswork, and archival research into military history, folk culture, and genealogy.
Much of Smith’s work interrogates the aesthetics and rituals of American militarism, craft traditions, and civic life, from fife-and-drum music and Civil War reenactment to quilting and needlework, using them as a lens onto questions of identity, gender, colonization, and collective memory. More recent projects turn this historical method inward, tracing Smith’s own ancestry across centuries of European migration and colonization to examine inherited trauma and the construction of family heritage through objects.
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