Sable Elyse Smith: Clockwork
MARCH 6-AUGUST 2, 2026
The Contemporary Austin
SEPTEMBER 24, 2026-FEBRUARY 13, 2027
The FLAG Art Foundation
Sable Elyse Smith (b. 1986, Los Angeles; lives and works in New York) is the 2026 recipient of the Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize. Featuring works spanning the past five years, Clockwork marks the artist’s most robust institutional exhibition to date and her first solo exhibition in Texas. Presenting newly commissioned work alongside selected key series in sculpture, video, neon, and works on paper, the exhibition has been thoughtfully designed by the artist to bring these distinct, interconnected bodies of work into dialogue.
Smith’s conceptually-driven practice examines systems of power, tracing how they operate not only as infrastructure but as psychological and cultural conditions that are often hidden in plain sight. Through formal strategies such as seriality, disorientation, appropriation, and shifts in scale, Smith builds on legacies of postminimal sculpture and conceptual art to reveal how these narratives are constructed, internalized, and unrelenting. The exhibition title, Clockwork, evokes the mechanical precision of the systems Smith interrogates—cyclical, seemingly inevitable, and often imperceptible—underscoring their quiet but persistent operations in everyday life.
The exhibition is co-curated by Alex Klein, Head Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs, and Julie Le, Assistant Curator, The Contemporary Austin. Following its debut in Austin, the exhibition will travel to The FLAG Art Foundation in New York in September 2026, organized by Jonathan Rider, Director. An accompanying exhibition catalogue co-published by The Contemporary Austin, The FLAG Art Foundation, and Dancing Foxes Press is forthcoming in early 2027.
About:
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.