Sable Elyse Smith at Regen Projects: “Sky Fence Ground” and the Grammar of the Carceral State

Somewhere in America, a children’s activity book explains the courtroom. A judge sits behind a bench, a bailiff stands by the door, and a child is invited to fill in the outlines with crayons. Sable Elyse Smith has spent years taking pages like these apart — literally, with a blade — and in Sable Elyse Smith’s “Sky Fence Ground” at Regen Projects in Los Angeles (6 November – 19 December 2026), she weaves them back together into something the publishers never intended: a picture of how a system teaches us to accept it.

Who is Sable Elyse Smith?

Smith was born in Los Angeles in 1986, so this is in a sense a homecoming. She studied at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta (BA, 2011) and took her MFA at Parsons in New York (2013), and she now lives and works on the East Coast. Her rise over the past five years has been steep. She showed at the 2022 Whitney Biennial, Quiet as It’s Kept, and in Cecilia Alemani’s The Milk of Dreams at the 59th Venice Biennale the same year; she was included in the Guggenheim’s Going Dark survey of the contemporary figure; MoMA gave her a Studio Sound presentation in 2024. In 2026 alone she has had a solo museum exhibition, Clockwork, at The Contemporary Austin, now travelling to The FLAG Art Foundation in New York, and has received the Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize. Her work sits in the collections of MoMA, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, the Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the ICA Boston.

What unites that career is a subject: the American prison system, and the way it reaches far beyond the walls — into families, childhoods, language and images. Her art avoids testimony in favour of structure. She is interested less in telling a story than in showing how a story is built.

Three works, three speeds

Regen Projects describes the show as new woven works on paper, a recent video and a monumental kinetic sculpture. It helps to think of them as three speeds of looking.

The slow one: the woven works. The Coloring Books series begins with pages from an activity book designed to teach children about the judicial process. Smith slices the sheets and interweaves the strips into an overlapping grid. The result looks, at a distance, like a Minimalist abstraction — the kind of rigorous grid painting associated with Agnes Martin or the woven paper experiments of the Bauhaus. Up close, fragments of cartoon handcuffs, gavels and smiling officers flicker in and out of view. Figure and ground keep swapping places. The gallery frames this as a disruption of the scenes’ coherence; in plain terms, the comforting narrative falls apart under scrutiny, but it never quite disappears.

The fast one: skin suit (2026). The new video assembles police chase and bodycam footage into a collage of conflicting moments, styled after reality television. Anyone who has watched American cable TV knows the genre: surveillance as entertainment. By cutting the material against itself, Smith asks who is filming, who is watching and who gets to narrate.

The relentless one: A Clockwork (2021). The centrepiece is a Ferris wheel nearly four and a half metres high, built from the bolted-down table-and-stool units found in prison visiting rooms. It turns, slowly, without ever arriving anywhere. Seen at the Whitney in 2022, it was one of the most talked-about objects of that Biennial — a fairground ride that is also a machine for repetition. The press text speaks of the carceral system running “like clockwork”, and the sculpture makes the idiom physical: routine as punishment, circularity as design.

The title as a sentence

Sky Fence Ground reads like the three horizontal bands of a landscape seen from inside a yard: the open sky above, the fence across the middle, the ground below. It is also a lesson in grammar — three nouns with no verb, no subject, no exit. Smith often works this way, letting language do the heavy lifting with very few words. The exhibition text opens with a short poem that begins by announcing a “grammar” of indoctrination, which is a useful key for the whole show: colouring books, reality TV and visiting-room furniture are all ways of teaching people their place.

Regen Projects and Los Angeles

Regen Projects, founded by Shaun Caley Regen, is one of the anchors of the Los Angeles gallery scene, with a programme that has long included artists such as Catherine Opie, Glenn Ligon and Raymond Pettibon. This is Smith’s second solo exhibition there, following FAIR GROUNDS in 2023. The timing matters: the show opens in a season when Los Angeles is crowded with major gallery openings, and while Clockwork is still on view at FLAG in New York, giving collectors and curators a rare chance to see her work on both coasts at once.

Why it matters

For collectors, the woven Coloring Books are the core of Smith’s studio practice and the works most likely to enter private collections; the institutional track record behind them is unusually deep for an artist in her thirties. For painters and anyone who thinks about abstraction, the exhibition is a sharp reminder that the grid is never neutral. Smith borrows the cool vocabulary of Minimalism and fills it with content that Minimalism tried to exclude. And for a general audience, the show is approachable: there is a wheel that turns, a screen that moves, pages that shimmer. The politics arrive gradually, which is exactly the point.

Visiting information

Regen Projects, 6750 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90038. 6 November – 19 December 2026. Artist-led walkthrough on Friday 6 November at 11am; opening reception the same day, 6–8pm. Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 10am–6pm. Telephone +1 310 276 5424. Full details are on our Sky Fence Ground exhibition listing and the official Regen Projects exhibition page. For more openings worldwide, see Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.