Sable Elyse Smith
Coloring Book 31, 2019. Screen printing ink, oil stick on paper, 60 x 100 inches
Left: Coloring Book 19, 2018. Right: Coloring Book 28, 2019.
Screen printing ink, oil stick, and oil pastel on paper, 60 x 50 inches each
Collectively titled Coloring Books, this series of work sources imagery from found coloring books meant to teach children how to interface with court sys-tems. Woven into a series of connect-the-dots and maze games is an implicit message about who does and does not belong in a courtroom, presenting criminality as a foregone conclusion to children who receive such a book. After enlarging the pages through a silk screening process, Smith intervenes to fill the space with evidence of her own hand. By combining childlike mark making with gestures of refusal Smith effectively counteracts the sinister visual and textual language of everyday structures that feed into the carceral state.
BIOGRAPHY
Born: Los Angeles, California, 1986
Resides: Richmond, Virginia
Education: Parsons School of Design (M.F.A., 2013); Oglethorpe University (B.A., 2011)
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2019 “Or the Song Spilling Out,” Carlos / Ishikawa, London.
2018 “BOLO: Be on (the) lookout,” JTT, New York.
“Ordinary Violence,” Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee.
“How We Tell Stories to Children,” Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Georgia.
“Sable E. Smith,” Condo: JTT, London.
2017 “Ordinary Violence,” Queens Museum, New York.
“And Then the Street Lights–like a Warning Bell,” Assembly (Recess), Brooklyn.
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2020 “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” MoMA PS1, Queens, New York.
“Catalyst: Art and Social Change,” Gracie Mansion Conservancy, New York.
“Young, Gifted and Black: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art,” Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx, New York.
“Colored People Time: Mundane Futures, Quotidian Pasts, Banal Presents,” MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
2019 “On Refusal: Representation and Resistance in Contemporary American Art,” MAC Belfast, Northern Ireland.
“Great Force,” VCU Institute for Contemporary Art, Richmond, Virginia.
“Young, Gifted, and Black: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art,” OSilas Gallery, Concordia College, Bronxville, New York.
“Colored People Time: Banal Presents,” Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.
“Mood / Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2018–19,” MoMA PS1, Queens, New York.
“Radical Reading Room,” Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.
“The Land I Live In,” Matthew Brown Gallery, Los Angeles.
2018 “Moving Body, Moving Study,” Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Brooklyn.
“Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the Justice System,” Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston.
“SITElines.2018: Casa tomada,” SITE Sante Fe, New Mexico.
“Agora,” High Line, New York.
“Prison Nation,” Aperture, New York.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
2020 McLean, Matthew. “Sable Elyse Smith Responds to the Rigged Logic of the US Criminal Justice System,” Frieze (January 28).
2019 Reid, Tiana. “In ‘Banal Presents,’ Three Black Artists Intervene in Vast Social Institutions, from the Prison System to Education,” Art in America (December 19).
Homersham, Lizzie. “Sable Elyse Smith,” Artforum (December 14).
Mitter, Siddhartha. “Silence Speaking Volumes: Artists Confront the Culture of Incarceration,” New York Times (August 1).
2018 Reid, Tiana. “Sable Elyse Smith Uses a Coloring Book for Kids in Court to Critique the Violence of Social Control,” New York (December 13).
Hamilton, Diana. “Firsthand at Arm’s Length,” Art in America (June / July).