VIDEO: Meet RedLine Resident Artist Autumn T. Thomas
Meet 2022-2024 RedLine Resident Artist Autumn T. Thomas!
Autumn T. Thomas (b. 1978) is an interdisciplinary artist currently working in wood sculpture.
Her work challenges the boundaries of visual literacy by transforming wood into soft, twisting forms, mimicking the endurance required to thrive amidst the oppression and marginalization of women of color.
Minimal in design, Thomas' work personifies analogous, brown bodies as whispering forms of subversion, affecting prejudice by way of perception and visual literacy.
Thomas is sponsored by Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator and the National Performance Network. She received her MFA in Book Arts and Printmaking from The University of the Arts, Philadelphia in 2017 and her BFA in Visual Communication from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. She lives and works in Denver, CO.
Watch the video of Autumn in her studio at RedLine to learn more about her and her practice!
“My name is Autumn T. Thomas, and I'm a wood sculpture artist. I make abstract sculptures. I get most of my inspiration from design. I'm really interested in really simple, yet complex sort of fluid shapes. So, that's where the shapes come from.
“And then the inspiration from, the meaning behind the work is really about reforming institutions. And so, there's a structural institution that we seem to sort of follow blindly, but the work is really about being able to shift it and mold it and allow it to still be strong, but it can be fluid as well.
“My primary material is wooden resin, and so it's the resin that sort of keeps the wood in its shape. And then I also use copper a lot.
“I wanted to be in RedLine to be a part of a community. RedLine is like a family, and there are different sort of parts of that family too, that it's really hard to narrow down into just a few words. But there's...the Youth Mentoring has been a really big part of my life that sort of influenced me in ways that I'm still trying to explain.
“There's a community aspect of working with other artists and being able to talk with other people. There'es all the staff members who are super helpful and friendly and supportive. And so, I feel like I really just wanted to be a part of this huge family.
“I'm looking forward to being able to work larger. I think, both physically and mentally, I've been sort of working in a smallish studio, and so that size, it encapsulates the ideas and so you don't really get to broaden what's bigger than the space that you're working in.
“And so, I'm excited to work bigger and I think that there's an encouragement to think big, and I've heard that multiple times from both the staff and past residents. And that actually is huge for someone to tell you to think as big as you can. And that is possible, that's huge.”
Meet Resident Artist Jasmine Holme
2022-2024 Resident Artists Jasmine Holmes & Autumn T. Thomas. Photo credit: Kyla Fear
Jasmine Holmes is a Southern artist who creates drawings through a variety of media. Her works are meant to offer discourse on consumerist society and its appetite for devouring Black culture.
She uses depictions of staple foods from her Creole upbringing, hair culture, music and textiles to showcase the eternal connections she keeps to her ancestral home.