Sable Elyse Smith

The Flag Art Foundation is pleased to present Clockwork, a solo exhibition featuring new and recent work by Sable Elyse Smith, the 2026 recipient of the Suzanne Deal Booth / Flag Art Foundation Prize. Following its presentation at The Contemporary Austin, Flag reframes Clockwork by expanding its more cinematic elements into an immersive stage set environment, where video becomes an immediate means of visualizing unseen, ordinary violence. Including sculpture, video, neon, and photography, Clockwork interrogates the fundamental systems of power that define contemporary society, as well as their cultural and psychological impacts. Through formal strategies such as seriality and repetition, disorientation, and appropriation, Smith illustrates how systems of power not only overlap, but how they intertwine and mutually reinforce one another.

Clockwork features two video installations that signal moments of transition and pause within the exhibition. By layering found and original footage in Laugh Track, or Who's that Peeking in My Window (2021) and skin suit (2026)—created specifically for the Prize—Smith collages conflicting moments of suspense, humor, poetry, frustration, and pathos to expose personal and institutional biases. Both videos take their cues from harried police chase/bodycam footage popularized by reality shows such as Cops (1989-2020), whose cultural impact would and continues to shape televised entertainment in the U.S.

Evoking the mechanical precision of the systems from which they derive, Smith's sculptures within the exhibition transform prison furniture in ways that show how repetition, doubling and layering can complicate, if not entirely obscure, the original meaning of their materials. In Barricade (2023), Barrier (2023), and Riot III (2022), Smith repurposes the metal stools that populate prison waiting rooms into star-shaped forms reminiscent of Jacks, the childhood game; in Gravity (2022) and Vanilla Wafer (2023), those same stools project from the gallery walls to create unambiguously cruciform shapes—each offering different possible interpretation of systems of reward and punishment.

In Smith's ongoing neon works, she turns an enduring interest in text into luminous forms, drawing on the aesthetics of institutional and commercial design to explore language as a psychological terrain. By playing with expectation and underscoring how language can, and so often is, used to reinforce prejudice and oppression, Smith also shows how it can be put to different, even liberatory uses. To further underscore the dissonance between image and language, Smith plays her Young Thug (2023) series throughout the exhibition, like musical notes. In this small-scale found photograph—framed and matted as if to exaggerate its gravity—a young white boy is shown wearing an American flag durag, cosplaying a trope of Black masculinity.

"Sable Elyse Smith embodies this vision through her profound exploration of the prison-industrial complex and the systems that shape language, perception, and identity. Her work transforms lived experience into a powerful cultural critique, revealing the often invisible structures of power that shape our collective reality." says Suzanne Deal Booth. "I am honored to recognize her as the 2026 recipient of the Prize, and to celebrate art's enduring capacity to inspire reflection, dialogue and change."

"For almost a decade, the Suzanne Deal Booth / Flag Art Foundation Prize has enfranchised some of the most innovative artists of our time at crucial points in their careers," says Glenn Fuhrman. "I could not be prouder of the four, singular exhibitions The Contemporary and FLAG have made with Nicole Eisenman, Tarek Atoui, Lubaina Himid, and now Sable Elyse Smith."

An accompanying, fully illustrated exhibition catalogue co-published by The Contemporary Austin, The Flag Art Foundation, and Dancing Foxes Press is forthcoming in early 2027. Contributors include the artist; Alex Klein, Head Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs, and Julie Le, former Assistant Curator, The Contemporary Austin; Jonathan Rider, Director, The Flag Art Foundation; Rizvana Bradley, Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley; and Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Curator and Curator of Performance at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Sable Elyse Smith (b. 1986, Los Angeles, CA) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in New York. Her creative practices span across video, performance, and the visual and literary arts. She has built a practice tracing the threads of violence and power embedded within systems of belief, infrastructure, language, intimacy, the quotidian, and beyond. She was recently included on the 2024 Time100 Next—the magazine's annual list of 100 individuals shaping the future of their fields and defining the next generation of leadership. Her work has been featured at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; MoMA PS1; New Museum; The Studio Museum in Harlem; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Institute of Contemporary Art Boston; and numerous others. In 2022, she was included in both the Whitney Biennial and the 59th Venice Biennale. Smith has received awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Creative Capital, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Fine Arts Work Center, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and Art Matters, among others. In 2025, she was an artist-in-residence at the Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva, as well as BOFFO Fire Island.

The Suzanne Deal Booth / Flag Art Foundation Prize selects each recipient based on their outstanding merit, strong record of international exhibitions, and the transformational impact the award stands to have on their career and the Austin and New York communities. A rotating independent advisory committee made up of curators and art historians of contemporary art selects each year's recipient. The prize includes an unrestricted $200,000 award, a full museum solo exhibition that premieres at The Contemporary Austin and travels to The Flag Art Foundation in New York, an accompanying publication, and related public programming.