Sable Elyse Smith: And Blue in a Decade Where It Finally Means Sky

Working in video, sculpture, photography, and text-based artworks, Smith draws attention to American systems of inequity. 

This is the first major monograph dedicated to the New York–based artist Sable Elyse Smith (born 1986). Through her wide-ranging multimedia practice, Smith elucidates how the carceral state (read America) quietly inflicts violence and is constantly reinforced by the seemingly banal: from furniture found in prison visitation rooms, to pages from state-issued children's coloring books.

Included in this publication are works produced from 2015 to the present day to provide a comprehensive overview of Smith’s videos, sculptures, photography, texts and printed matter. Accompanying over 140 color images are texts by Horace Ballard (Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. Associate Curator of American Art at Harvard Art Museums), Johanna Burton (Executive Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (author of Friday Black), and Christina Sharpe (writer, professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University).

Sable Elyse Smith is a 2018-19 Studio Museum in Harlem artist in residence. 

Author(s): 

Horace Ballard, Johanna Burton, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Christina Sharpe

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Hardcover, JTT, New York/Regen Projects, Los Angeles, 2022
224 p, 6.5 × 9.5 in. 

Photos by JTT