Professor Sable Elyse Smith, Winner of the Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize, Presents 'Clockwork' at The Contemporary Austin
Associate Professor of Visual Arts Sable Elyse Smith is the 2026 recipient of the Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize, a biennial prize that supports an artist with a $200,000 award and a solo exhibition premiering at The Contemporary Austin and traveling to the FLAG Art Foundation in New York.
Smith's most extensive institutional show to date, Clockwork presents work created over the past five years of her career that examines the violence and power embedded in systems of belief, language, and infrastructure. Employing a conceptual approach to sculpture, photography, and text, Smith pinpoints the psychological effects of seemingly quotidian systems of power.
The artist's Texas debut brings key works from Smith's oeuvre into conversation with new image- and video-based works in addition to a neon commission—a part of a series of large-scale wall works about her personal experience with the prison-industrial complex, which draws on the tension between the public nature of neon signage and the interiority of her texts. The title, Clockwork, reflects Smith's mechanistic approach to conceptual art. Using formal strategies like seriality, disorientation, appropriation, and shifts in scale, she displays how narratives are constructed intentionally over time, and then internalized.
The exhibition's conceptual center is Smith's career-defining (and largest ever) kinetic sculpture, A Clockwork (175 ½" x 165" x 98", aluminum, steel, motor, 2021)—a Ferris Wheel constructed from prison waiting room furniture. First presented in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, it churns slowly, making a spectacle of the slow, unrelenting pain made mundane by the carceral state.
On the walls, Smith's sculptures are accompanied by works from her Coloring Book series, which appropriates the punchy, colorful aesthetic of children’s coloring books, highlighting the complicity of the justice and educational systems.
"The Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize was established in 2016 to support artists whose work challenges us to see the world anew and to engage deeply with its complexities," patron of the arts Suzanne Deal Booth was quoted in the exhibition's press release. "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. 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."
Clockwork is on view March 6–August 2, 2026 at The Contemporary Austin and will travel to the FLAG Art Foundation in New York in September 2026.
A New York based interdisciplinary artist, Sable Elyse Smith's work spans the visual, literary, moving image, and performing arts. She was included on the 2024 TIME100 Next—the magazine's annual list of 100 individuals who are shaping the future of their fields. Her work has been featured at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), MoMA Ps1, the New Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, among others. In 2022, she was a participant in both the Whitney Biennial and the 59th Venice Biennale, and her first opera, If you unfolded us, premiered at MoMA in July 2024. Smith has received awards from Joan Mitchell Foundation, Creative Capital, Suzanne Deal Booth / Flag Art Foundation Prize, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Fine Arts Work Center, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and Art Matters among others.