User:DianaOfDelos/sandbox

I can't figure out how to bold the sources I added, so I'll copy them here:


 * Kamps, Toby (2008). Old Weird America: Folk Themes in Contemporary Art. Contemporary Arts Museum Houson. p. 128. ISBN 978-1-933619-12-5
 * Eccles, Tom (2007). Allison Smith: The Muster: What Are You Fighting For?. New York, NY: Public Art Fund. ISBN 978-0-9608488-4-3.
 * Vogel, Wendy (2010). Allison Smith: Needle Work. St Louis, MO: Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. ISBN 978-0-936316-30-7.
 * Bryan-Wilson, Julia (2008). "The Politics of Crafts". Modern Painters. 20 (1): 78 &#x2013; via EBSCOhost.
 * Sommer, Danielle (2013). "Exhibition Review: Social Fabric". Textile. 11 (3): 328–333.
 * Morse, Trent (2015). "Material Girl". ARTnews. 114 (1): 36–38.

Sunny A. Smith (born 1972 in Manassas, Virginia) is an American artist who is based in Oakland, California. Smith's work draws from American history to create artworks which combine social practice, performance, and craft-based sculpture.

Smith has exhibited their work professionally since 1995 in the United States and internationally. They have produced over twenty-five solo exhibitions, installations, performances, and artist-led participatory projects for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Public Art Fund, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, The Arts Club of Chicago, and Indianapolis Museum of Art.

In a 2008 group interview with art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson in Modern Painters, Smith states "We are conceptual artists whose subject is craft," indicating Smith's theoretical framework and the personal theory behind much of Smith's work.

Education and early career
'''Smith grew up in Manassas, Virginia, near multiple Civil War battlefields. This inspired much of their subsequent work related to the Civil War. ''' Smith received a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in psychology from The New School for Social Research, a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in fine arts from Parsons School of Design, and a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in sculpture from the Yale University School of Art. They also participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. They lived in New York City from 1990 until 2008 when they relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area to join the faculty of California College of the Arts, where they are a tenured professor and Dean of Fine Arts.

Career
Sunny A. Smith has exhibited their work professionally since 1995 in the United States and in England, France, Germany, Spain, New Zealand, and South Korea. They have produced over twenty-five solo exhibitions, installations, performances, and artist-led participatory projects for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Public Art Fund, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver,  Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, The Arts Club of Chicago,  and Indianapolis Museum of Art.

They have exhibited their work in over one hundred group exhibitions at galleries and museums including P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center at the Museum of Modern Art New York, Palais de Tokyo, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Andy Warhol Museum, The Mattress Factory, and The Tang Museum. Smith has lectured on their work extensively at art schools and research universities in the United States and abroad, as well as at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, SculptureCenter and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.

Their work has been featured and reviewed in The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Sculpture, on NPR, KQED, Art:21, and in other media and scholarly publications. Smith has received generous support from United States Artists, Arts Council England, For-Site Foundation, Creative Work Fund, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Artadia, and New York Foundation for the Arts. Notable residencies include the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, the Museum of Modern Art Artists Experiment initiative, the International Studio and Curatorial Program in Brooklyn, New York, Artpace San Antonio, Texas, and Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California.

'''Smith formerly owned a storefront called SMITHS in downtown Oakland. When naming the space, they chose to omit the apostrophe to represent their decision to invite in various makers (or "smiths") to host workshops and lectures about their crafts. Smith strove for attendees to learn skills and hear stories and social histories.'''

Smith's work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Saatchi Gallery London

Notable works
In 2005, Smith produced a public art project The Muster that engages with the question, "What are you fighting for?" on the subject of Civil War reenactments, involving participants who made uniforms and campsites. '''Participants were invited to then loudly proclaim their cause in front of hundreds of spectators. Smith posed as the self-proclaimed "Mustering Officer" and led the proceedings.''' In an article in ArtNet News discussing art about Civil War reenactments, Brian Boucher says it "focused on the kitschy aesthetics of Civil War reenactment, referring to the conflict in only the most oblique way." This project was performed on Governor's Island, a former military base located just off of southern Manhattan.

'From 2005-2007, Smith worked on a piece called Notion Nanny.'' Based on a type of popular Victorian peddler dolls who traditionally held a basket filled with miniature goods, Smith created a lifesize version made with ceramic casts of their own face, arms, and legs to hold their own handmade crafts. Throughout those two years, Smith traveled around to work with local craftspeople in an interactive and collaborative fashion. Smith considered it an active and changing process, as items were added and removed, and the show itself traveled between locations.'''

In 2008, Smith produced a performance art project The Donkey, The Jackass, and The Mule which involved three large carved wooden equine statues on wheels (in reference to President Andrew Jackson's opponents slogan "Andrew Jackson was a Jackass") and many human handlers in 19th century dress shouting "cast that vote" and carrying signs relating to women's suffrage down an Indianapolis highway overpass. The piece was part of the 2008 Indianapolis Museum of Art's exhibition On Procession curated by Rebecca Uchill. This work is deeply engaged with early American aesthetics and symbols, from the Andrew Jackson slogan to the idea of "40 acres and a mule".

In 2009, Smith produced Needle Work in which they re-created the cloth gas masks commonly used in World Wars I and II. These masks were not commonly collected or held by museums as they were often home made and most of the traces exist within grainy photographs. In this piece, Smith references their interests in historical reenactment, conceptual craft, and process as performance. Given what we know about the creation of these masks, Smith attempted to re-create them the best they could using common household materials of today such as plastic water bottles. The masks have an appearance that is simplistic yet unsettling or even trauma-inducing. Given the context of 2009, these masks were hauntingly familiar to viewers as they remember the horrors of the Abu Ghraib Archive 'In a 2013 review in Textile'', writer Danielle Sommer points out that "the name 'Needle Work' is itself a double entendre, and represents both Smith's technique and the way a creative process (or project) might get under one's skin." '''

In 2013, Smith exhibited Stockpile, an assemblage of Early American wood furniture, in Santa Barbara, CA at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. This work aimed to consider the purpose of the objects, where and how they are made, and the arrangement of the items suggesting a panicked stockpile