Professor Sable Elyse Smith in MoMA PS1 Group Exhibition 'Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration'

By
Brittany Nguyen
October 05, 2020

Assistant Professor Sable Elyse Smith has work in the MoMA PS1 group exhibition Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration with her piece “Pivot II” and other works.

Organized by Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration is a major exhibition that “explores the work of artists within US prisons and the centrality of incarceration to contemporary art and culture. Featuring art made by people in prisons and work by nonincarcerated artists concerned with state repression, erasure, and imprisonment, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration highlights more than 35 artists” and has been updated to “reflect the growing COVID-19 crisis in US prisons, featuring new works by exhibition artists made in response to this ongoing emergency,” as stated on the gallery website

“On view across PS1’s first floor galleries, Marking Time features works that bear witness to artists’ reimagining of the fundamentals of living—time, space, and physical matter—pushing the possibilities of these basic features of daily experience to create new aesthetic visions achieved through material and formal invention. The resulting work is often laborious, time-consuming, and immersive, as incarcerated artists manage penal time through their work and experiment with the material constraints that shape art making in prison. The exhibition also includes work made by nonincarcerated artists—both artists who were formerly incarcerated and those personally impacted by the US prison system. From various sites of freedom or unfreedom, these artists devise strategies for visualizing, mapping, and making physically present the impact and scale of life under carceral conditions. Alongside the exhibition, a series of public programs, education initiatives, and ongoing projects will explore the social and cultural impact of mass incarceration.”

Following this exhibition, an accompanying book also titled Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, written by Dr. Fleetwood, is up for sale. 

Sable Elyse Smith

Smith is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator based in New York. Using video, sculpture, photography, and text, she points to the carceral, the personal, the political, and the quotidian to speak about a violence that is largely unseen, and potentially imperceptible. Her work has been featured at MoMA PS1, New Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem,  Brooklyn Museum, New York; ICA Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA; and MIT List Visual Arts Centers, Cambridge, MA amongst others. She has received awards from Creative Capital, Fine Arts Work Center, the Queens Museum, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Rema Hort Mann Foundation, the Franklin Furnace Fund, and Art Matters. 

Smith’s “Pivot II” and other works are available to view at MoMA PS1 through April 4, 2021, by advance timed tickets only. Tickets must be reserved online prior to entering. MoMA PS1 is open Thursdays through Mondays from 12 pm—8 pm.