Inside Kasey Smith’s Journey of Connecting the Past with the Present

Kasey Smith is a talented artist who turns stories and memories into meaningful art. In this interview, she shares how her love for digging into history and exploring hidden connections shaped her creative path. From uncovering old treasures in her childhood backyard to mapping ghost signs in San Francisco, Kasey’s work is all about preserving the past and making it come alive in new ways.

She opens up about the highs and lows of her journey, like creating a community project to honor vintage signs and adjusting her art practice after moving to the Netherlands. Kasey also talks about how she finds inspiration in local history, tackles challenges with creativity, and uses art to connect people to the stories around them.

I find artistic inspiration digging through history books as if they were soil. Unearthing fertile stories in the lost horizons beneath our feet. I’ve been blending local history and craft/art traditions for almost twenty years to explore stories of loss, value, and redemption. A guerrilla art show about Faberge’s Imperial Eggs and personal fragility. A walking tour about the parallels between San Francisco’s history and Louis Comfort Tiffany’s art career. An interactive, community-sourced map of the locations of old hand-painted signs.

I believe in art; you can see, touch, read like a story, experience like a co-conspirator, and wear a favorite coat. Inspired by my move to the Netherlands and my mother’s Alzheimers, my current work centers on collective memory and shifting phases of being. I’m learning to be Dutch by studying the Dutch Masters in a six-year art/performance “apprenticeship.” I’m also exploring collective grief and the act of survivorship by painting ephemeral memento moris for those with memory disorders. Like much of my work, these projects are united by their cross-disciplinary approach to exploring what we remember and what we forget. As well as their grounding in culturally significant organic objects.

1. How would you describe your art style, and what inspired you to become an artist?

I was always a creative child, making and painting things and buying silly little arts and crafts kits at the toy store. When I was in high school, I got really depressed and found solace in repetitive actions. Some of these were healthier than others, but one involved excavating the backyard. My childhood home was built in 1902, and my elderly neighbors on both sides were descended from the original owners. This was in the country at a time before garbage collection, so there were all kinds of garbage caches and burn barrel scars on the property. I would excavate these spots with a shovel and a sifting screen and run the finds by my neighbors to see if any stories came up. I learned who left the whiskey bottles, whose china pattern was whose, and who the medical waste belonged to. It got me addicted to hidden stories and the connection between objects and memories. Pretty much from then on, I knew this was what I wanted from my life.

I believe in art you can see, can touch, can read like a story, experience like a co-conspirator, and wear like a favorite coat.

Kasey Smith

2. Can you tell us about a particular piece of art that holds special meaning for you?

I was a teenager when SFMOMA opened their building on Third Street in San Francisco. Not long after the opening, I remember staring at Jeff Koons’ Michael Jackson and Bubbles sculpture and thinking about how I wanted to destroy whatever genre of art that sculpture belonged to. He’s been such an anti-inspiration to me, and I still hate him to this day.

3. Can you describe a memorable experience or project that significantly impacted your career?

My dad was a vintage sign collector, and my childhood home was full of old Coca-Cola and 7-Up signs and the like. When he died in 2010, it really upended my world, and I reached this place where I didn’t want to be alone but also didn’t really want to interact with people either. So I just started walking the streets of San Francisco, taking pictures and reveling in feeling alone in the crowd. Somewhere between the grief and the walking, I decided to do a photo mapping project of all the old hand-painted signs in the city. In my mind, this was going to be a six-month project, but it’s grown into this whole social practice project called the San Francisco Bay Area Ghost Sign Mapping Project with maps, walking tours, community research days, and public talks that I’m still working on to this day. You can check it out here — https://sfghostsigns.com/.

4. What challenges have you faced as an artist, and how did you overcome them?

I’m still in the middle of it! But in 2022, I picked up my life in the San Francisco Bay Area and moved to the Netherlands. This would have been hard enough for anyone, but so much of my art practice is about local history, geography, and ecology, which just doesn’t translate internationally. How do you make art about a place you’ve just arrived in? The answer for me has been to go back to school — but with a conceptual and historically accurate twist. So I’m putting myself through an art apprenticeship of sorts by studying the works of the Dutch and Flemish masters. Much like a traditional art apprenticeship, this involves deep academic study and recreating their most iconic works. I’m currently wrapping up the first phase, which was a two-year study of the solitary female subjects of Johannes Vermeer’s paintings. I was inspired by the writings of Lawrence Gowing and what he dubbed Vermeer’s “pearl pictures” to recreate these fourteen paintings using freshwater pearls. It’s a very analog take on pixel art, and I love how abstract they look. But they have this gorgeous glow, and from a distance or an angle, these women pop off the canvas.

I find artistic inspiration digging through history books as if they were soil. Unearthing fertile stories in the lost horizons beneath our feet.

Kasey Smith

5. How do you approach collaboration with other artists or creatives?

I have a complicated relationship with collaboration. This is a polite way of saying that I have been burned by it before and, more importantly, that I have burned other people with it. I used to naively believe that setting a shared goal and working towards it was enough, which severely undercuts the importance of communication in the process and turns the process into a stressful slog. There is no such thing as too much talking, sharing, level-setting, and checking in during the collaborative process. Do we understand each other’s goals? Do we understand each other’s preferred outcomes and definitions of success? Do we understand each other’s working and communication methods? Do we understand each other’s boundaries? Do we understand each other’s inspirations and reasons for believing in the work? Collaboration is such a nuanced dance; the more you talk and listen, the more instep you will be.

Kasey Smith’s art shows us how powerful history and memory can be when combined with creativity. Through her projects and artistic process, she helps us remember the stories of the past while connecting them to our lives today. To learn more about Kasey, visit the links below.