In the summer of 2023, RMCAD students interviewed our 2022-2024 Resident Artists in their studios. Their video interview of Autumn T. Thomas explores how her work personifies analogous, brown bodies as whispering forms of subversion, affecting prejudice by way of perception and visual literacy.
Autumn T. Thomas (b. 1978) is an interdisciplinary, self-trained wood sculpture artist. Her work challenges the boundaries of visual literacy: hundreds of cuts placed into the wood transforms it into soft, twisting forms, mimicking the endurance required to thrive amidst the oppression and marginalization of women of color—each cut represents a time in which Thomas felt cut down by society.
Thomas is sponsored by National Performance Network and Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator, and is a current artist in residence at RedLine Contemporary Art Center in Denver, CO, where she lives and works.
“We come in a lot of different shapes and forms and sizes, and not everything that we see represents who we see ourselves as. If we can see ourselves in the abstract, that allows us to broaden our mind and see ourselves as anything that we want to be, not just what we’re told that we can be.”
Watch the RMCAD interview with Autumn in her RedLine studio to learn more about her and her practice!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION:
“Hi, I'm Autumn T. Thomas, and I'm an artist in residence here at RedLine Contemporary Art Center in Denver, Colorado.
“I work most often with wood. Wood is my favorite. I also use metals, I use copper, and then what other elements go with the piece that I'm working on right now. So for example, right now I'm working with some concrete, so combining concrete and wood, sort of exploring that to see where that goes.
“The exotic nature of the wood is important because I consider myself to be exotic. The woods are typically coming from either Africa or South America, and so, one, they're woods that are not necessarily native to this country, just like myself. They're hard to find in their natural sort of habitat, just like myself. They also present in very rare and not often seen sort of colors and variations.
“Those types of woods just aren't normally found as easily in the United States. I prefer to sort of seek out the more difficult to find woods and give them their luster and give them their, I don't know, it's like they're sort of traveling the transatlantic experience, the way that black people traveled the transatlantic experience. And so they've already been filled.
“They're trees that have already been taken out of their natural habitat. I'm sort of giving them their life back. And the analogy is that I'm giving myself my life back, and I'm giving back the life of my ancestors whose lives have been taken, very similarly to exotic wood.
“My work comes directly from experiencing bias literally every single day. The shapes and the forms that my wood take, my sculptures take, represent really sort of the experience of reshaping an uncomfortable moment or an uncomfortable sort of, what I like to say, foundation or institution.
“There's this constant feel, at least for me as a Black woman, there's this constant rigidity to the way that I'm expected to live my life versus the way that I do live my life. The abstract forms that I make, they are literally reshaping and reforming these sort of institutions that I feel like I'm constantly coming up against.
“When you see a piece of wood that is normally expected to be straight and maybe vertical or holding something—when you see it curved in a circle or in a fluid shape—that's literally sort of subverting the expectation that I'm going to live this straight and narrow lifestyle.
“The processes that go into the wood, also, I'll say that each piece starts out as a straight piece of wood, and I put a bunch of curve cuts into the wood. So each one of those cuts is a way that I can sort of methodically and repetitively sort of put the energy into the work. And once all those cuts are made, then that wood becomes flexible. And for me, that's a transference of energy.
“I get to do all these very specific cuts. I'm also inserting all my angst and all of my sort of upset nature into the wood that allows it to then become flexible. So it's really a relationship that I've built, and that's really how black women have sort of been forced to live their lives.
“There are multiple messages, I'll say that. To other Black women and Black girls, specifically young people, I'm trying to say that we can envision ourselves in a more broad spectrum than what we're allowing ourselves right now. And so what we see a lot of times, specifically as Black artists, is representational art. We'll see paintings of people, which is all sort of relevant.
“What happens is we start to consume only what we're being shown, and we lose track of the abstract nature of ourselves. So I'm saying that we can be anything we want to be, literally anything. And I'm making these pieces to sort of say that each one of these pieces is new and different, and it's me, and it represents you, and it's beautiful and odd and different, and also valid.
“I think that we come in a lot of different shapes and forms and sizes, and not everything that we see represents who we see ourselves as. If we can see ourselves in the abstract, that allows us to broaden our mind and see ourselves as anything that we want to be, not just what we're told that we can be.
“I look, one, at a lot of design. I love architectural design, I love minimalism, and I love emotion. It's the combination of those two that sort of inspire me to take a form and to put emotion to that form. And so even if it's just, let's say there's a circle. I like circles a lot. I might think, ‘Okay, well, if I feel like I'm whole, what's a thing that's making me also feel like I'm unwhole? And what shape would represent that feeling?’ That's sort of the thought process that goes into my abstract way of thought, if you will.
“One thing that I wish people understood was that it takes longer than one viewing to understand not only my work, but an artist's work. I hope, my goal is for my work to sort of imbue feeling and imbue emotion. It's hard to get that feeling and that emotion if you look at it for two seconds and then you walk away. So the work is sort of asking for you to be in relationship with it, just like I am in relationship with it.
“The same can be said of relationship with people. The work is meant to represent the way that we interact with each other. So if I ask you to look at a sculpture that I've spent maybe three months working on, if I ask you to spend 10 minutes or 20 minutes in three different settings, I'm also asking you to treat me as a person with that same regard and each other with that same regard. But I think a lot of times what we expect of art and what we allow art to give us is just it's way more minimal than it deserves. That's actually the only answer. That's the answer.
“One, I think contemporary art is a term for other people. It's not a term for people who are currently making art, because there's no reason for me to say I'm a contemporary artist because I am being it. Right? I don't have to tell you that I'm alive. I'm alive, you see that. Right? So that's one answer.
“To be contemporary means to be forward-thinking as opposed to historical thinking. What I mean is making work that is pushing boundaries and looking ahead as opposed to making work that replicates work that's already been made. So to be contemporary means to make your own rules, or make new rules, or to make new rules as opposed to following rules that have already been sort of established.
“That's a tough question to answer, but it's because I don't think about what it means to be contemporary because I'm being contemporary. So it's a very meta question as an artist, I think.”
