The artist traces her path toward creating powerful works on America’s relationship between incarceration and capital

As told to Janelle Zara

How I became an artist: Sable Elyse Smith

‘Throughout the early years of my education, the only artists I’d hear about were&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/6746/Pablo-Picasso" target="_blank">Pablo Picasso</a> or&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/13517/Claude-Monet" target="_blank">Claude Monet</a>. I didn’t really have a concept of living, working artists. When I was growing up in Los Angeles, my first experience with art and art-making was through food. Cooking was a way to creatively express myself. When I took a ceramics class in high school, I sculpted a lobster-tail dinner plate with green beans and a baked potato with two pats of butter on top. At that age, I thought that was the epitome of fine dining.

‘I graduated high school in 2004, and visual art practice wasn’t really on my radar until college. I didn’t have any guidance or assumption about what school was supposed to be – I was just following my curiosity. Right out of high school, I started a five-year architecture program at Hampton University in Virginia but, for financial reasons, I had to move back to California after a semester. I took classes at a community college until I moved to Atlanta, and finally enrolled in a college there. Because I was an older student, I valued my course of study as opposed to just continuing down some predetermined path.‘In 2007 and 2008, I studied abroad in London, and all I did was go to museums. It was an informal education that I was creating for myself, expanding my knowledge of contemporary art. I was introduced to&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8327/Kara-Walker" target="_blank">Kara Walker</a>’s work for the first time at Tate Modern, and I was like: “Oh, this is fascinating. Who is this person?”

‘I studied studio art and film at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. My early works were in video because I had a love for cinema, and it was accessible: It was a creative outlet I could do in my bedroom while I was working a bunch of jobs, and all I needed was a laptop. After I graduated in 2011, I moved to New York and enrolled in Parsons’s Design &amp; Technology MFA program, still searching for a stable field to find a job in. Once I graduated from Parsons in 2013, I worked full-time in museum education at the Studio Museum in Harlem for three years. That was my real contemporary art education, and it was lovely becoming immersed in that community. In 2015, I did a small show at Soho 20 gallery in Bushwick, but mainly I was working a lot, which didn’t provide a lot of space to make art.‘But the following year I got two opportunities: a nine-month residency at Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a USD 20,000 grant from the Queens Museum’s Jerome Foundation Fellowship, which culminated in a solo exhibition. That meant a free house, a free studio, and the free time to see what kind of work I might make with no interruptions. I decided to quit my job and at least ride out those nine months, then figure out what was next after that. If I hadn’t had that opportunity, I wouldn’t have had the space to reflect and dream – to actually see what an art practice would look and feel like for myself.

‘I took my video practice into the residency but, since I had space and access to facilities, I started experimenting a lot with photography, making physical and digital collages and trying to introduce other materials to them. I started with family photographs that were taken in a prison visiting room, thinking about the dynamics around the production of that image. Prisons have these murals – backdrops with lush landscapes or cheesy tropical scenes for photographs. The idea is that an incarcerated person can have a moment of escape and pretend they’re in the Caribbean. It’s absurd. These found images were the starting point to tease out conversations about the intimacy of a photograph and the lives of incarcerated people, but then also to try to say something about the prison system more broadly. It’s an idea that crystallized into a more refined series of works that I’m still making now.

‘Some of the violence in prisons is obvious. Some of those violent aspects, however, are harder to name; the latter is an accumulation of smaller touch points that create a larger impact. Thinking about these spaces for myself, and having read a lot of theory and literature about the criminal justice system over the past five to 10 years, I want to point out those illegible things. I’m interested in talking about our constructed assumptions that prisons need to exist.‘The prison visiting room is an interesting architectural and social space to examine the impact of the system. My research method catalogs the materials and objects that exist there, how its rules determine what kinds of interactions are possible, and then what happens formally. Take prison tables, for example. Their design seems normal and neutral: a tabletop with stools connected to it. But the dimensions are skewed for visibility purposes. The tabletop comes very close to your knees, so it’s harder for people to pass things under the table. Surveillance is baked into the design. The production of these tables is also a billion-dollar industry and, for that industry to thrive, they need bodies to populate them. My 2021 kinetic sculpture A Clockwork,&nbsp;which was shown at the most recent Whitney Biennial, is a table in the shape of a moving wheel: a reference to the perpetuation of a loop, doing time, and the reliance on incarceration to produce capital. My interest is for people to look closer at these things and question them, and not just accept them as a necessity or an absolute.’

<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/40914/Sable-Elyse-Smith">Sable Elyse Smith</a> is represented by <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1573/JTT">JTT</a>, New York City; <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1256/Regen-Projects">Regen Projects</a>, Los Angeles; and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/2005/Carlos-Ishikawa" target="_blank">Carlos/Ishikawa</a>, London.


	Janelle Zara is a freelance writer specializing in art and architecture. She is the author of Masters at Work: Becoming an Architect (2019). She currently lives in Los Angeles.


	Captions for full-bleed images: 1.&nbsp;Sable Elyse Smith, Gravity, 2022 (detail).&nbsp;Courtesy of the artist; JTT, New York; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; and Carlos/Ishikawa, London. Photo by Charles Benton. 2. Installation view of Sable Elyse Smith's exhibition 'Tithe', JTT, New York City, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and JTT, New York.&nbsp;Photo by Charles Benton.

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The artist traces her path toward creating powerful works on America’s relationship between incarceration and capital

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