Sable Elyse Smith is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in New York. Her creative practice spans the visual, literary, moving image and performing arts. Language is an ARCHITECTURE. She has built a practice tracing the threads of violence and power embedded within systems of belief, infrastructure, language, intimacy, the quotidian, and beyond. She was recently included on the 2024 TIME100 Next—The magazine's annual list of 100 individuals who are shaping the future of their fields and defining the next generation of leadership. In 2024, she debuted an operatic work at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The artist’s staging included an original libretto and video for the performance titled If you unfolded us. Her largest sculpture to-date was presented in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, Quiet as it’s Kept. The kinetic piece, A Clockwork (2021), is a moving wheel composed of furniture usually relegated to institutional settings, emphasizing the perpetual machinery of production of both the architectural elements and systems they inhabit. The same year a large neon work was installed in the Venice Biennale curated by Cecilia Alemani. The artist’s poem, illuminated, were the final words visitors read upon exiting the Giardini in Venice: “We seem to all be standing here wrapped around this fist tonight […]”.

Her work has also been exhibited at MoMA Ps1, New Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, and numerous others. 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. This summer she was an artist-in-residence at the Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva, as well as BOFFO in Fire Island. In spring 2026, a solo exhibition of her work will be presented at the Contemporary Austin and travel to Flag Art Foundation, New York as part of the granted award from the Suzanne Deal booth / Flag Art Foundation prize.