In Conversation: Sable Elyse Smith, Boots Riley, and Rizvana Bradley
On March 25 (Wed), 6:30–8P, join The Contemporary Austin on The Moody Rooftop at the Jones Center for a conversation between 2026 Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize recipient artist Sable Elyse Smith, acclaimed filmmaker, musician, and writer Boots Riley, and scholar Rizvana Bradley.
Held in tandem with Smith’s new exhibition Clockwork, the discussion will examine how Smith and Riley’s subtle, surreal, and spectacular works in moving-image, sound, text, and expanded media both expose and confront systems of power and surveillance. Framed through Bradley’s critical lens, the conversation will illuminate shared strategies through which Smith and Riley mobilize image and text (cinematic, sculptural, and sonic) as sites of critique and possibility.
This event is presented in partnership with A Counter-Imaginary in Authoritarian Times, a national, multi-year initiative engaging artists, academics, activists, and community members, based at the Center for Critical Inquiry and the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs at the University of California, Berkeley.
About the panelists
Sable Elyse Smith (b. 1986, Los Angeles; lives and works in New York) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer whose creative practice spans across video, performance, and the visual and literary arts. Her work traces 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 shaping the future of their fields and defining the next generation of leadership. Her work has been featured at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; MoMA PS1; New Museum; The Studio Museum in Harlem; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Institute of Contemporary Art Boston; and numerous others. In 2022, she was included in both the Whitney Biennial and the 59th Venice Biennale. Smith has received awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Creative Capital, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Fine Arts Work Center, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and Art Matters, among others. In 2025, she was an artist-in-residence at the Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva, as well as BOFFO Fire Island.
Portrait of Sable Elyse Smith. Photograph by Tommy Kha.
Boots Riley is a filmmaker, activist and musician known for bringing messages regarding economic and class critique as well as politically progressive movement building into wide public discussion. His directorial debut, Sorry to Bother You, premiered to strong critical acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival. By embedding messages regarding income inequality into dystopian science fiction satire, Sorry to Bother You expanded the scope of anti capitalist critique. Boots’s forthcoming second feature film I Love Boosters centers on a crew of professional shoplifters who take aim at a cutthroat fashion CEO. The cast includes Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, Poppy Liu, Eiza Gonzalez, LaKeith Stanfield, Don Cheadle and Demi Moore. His seven-part series I’m A Virgo starred EMMY award winning actor Jharrel Jerome along with Mike Epps, Carmen Ejogo and Kara Young. He is the frontman of The Coup and of Street Sweeper Social Club, featuring Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine. Fervently dedicated to social change, Boots was deeply involved with the Occupy Oakland movement and was one of the leaders of the activist group The Young Comrades. He is the author of the critically acclaimed collection of essays Tell Homeland Security - We Are the Bomb.
Boots Riley is represented by Evil Twin Booking Agency. Image credit: Evil Twin Booking Agency.
Rizvana Bradley is Associate Professor of Film and Media and Affiliated Faculty in the History of Art, the Program in Critical Theory, and the Center for Race and Gender at the University of California, Berkeley. Bradley is the author of Anteaesthetics (2023), shortlisted for the 2024 MLA Prize for a First Book and named one of the Top Books of 2023 by Frieze. Her art criticism has been published in The Yale Review, Artforum, e-flux, Art in America, and Parkett. Bradley has also curated academic-arts symposia at the British Film Institute, London, the Serpentine Galleries, London, the Stedelijk Museum of Art, Amsterdam, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York.
Rizvana Bradley Image Credit: Cassidy DuHon