Visiting
Object Label
Sable Elyse Smith’s Visiting takes the rules and instructions for visitors to prisons and reinvents them as an artwork, intermingling official regulations with the ordinary violence of frisking and surveillance. Making visible the interior and often unseen space of mass incarceration in the United States—where imprisoned people, including the artist’s father, are not allowed to share images of their experience—Smith’s work comments on the impersonal bureaucracies that contain and control individuals.
Caption
Sable Elyse Smith American, born 1986. Visiting, 2017. Acrylic, install dims, approx.: 30 × 20 in. (76.2 × 50.8 cm) storage (housing prepared January 2021): 2 × 11 1/2 × 14 in. (5.1 × 29.2 × 35.6 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection, 2019.38. © artist or artist's estate
Gallery
Not on view
Gallery
Not on view
Artist
Title
Visiting
Date
2017
Medium
Acrylic
Classification
Dimensions
install dims, approx.: 30 × 20 in. (76.2 × 50.8 cm) storage (housing prepared January 2021): 2 × 11 1/2 × 14 in. (5.1 × 29.2 × 35.6 cm)
Credit Line
Gift of The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection
Accession Number
2019.38
Rights
© artist or artist's estate
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Frequent Art Questions
Tell me more.
Smith uses text to speak about quotidian violence and prisons. Her work on mass incarceration emerges from two decades of visiting her father in prison.
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