Autumn Breon is a multidisciplinary artist that investigates the visual vocabulary of liberation through a queer Black feminist lens. Using performance, sculpture, and public installation, Breon invites audiences to examine intersectional identities and Diasporic memory.
An exercise in radical spectacle, her 2022 performance (Don’t) Use Me, was the culmination of the artist’s qualitative examination of time through the lens of Black women’s labor. Due to the racial and gender pay gaps, Black women are typically paid 63 cents for every dollar paid to white men. It takes about eight months into the next calendar year for a Black woman to earn what a white man earns in 365 days. To reclaim and further quantify this lost time, Breon invited Black women to respond to the following question: What would you do with eight extra months of paid time?
During a performance at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, she wore these responses and invited the public to read Black women’s reclamations of time aloud. After the performance, self-portraits inspired by each worn response were sold via blockchain. Survey participants were included as co-creators in the permanent digital ledger; as a result, they continue to be paid in perpetuity as the digital art sells.
In addition to performance, Breon also uses public art to share her qualitative and quantitative research with the public. Her 2023 work Leisure Lives, honors Santa Monica’s Bay Street Beach and the Black spatial imaginary. Only a few miles from Frieze Art Fair, Bay Street Beach was a seaside haven for Black Californians’ recreation in the early to mid-twentieth century. A colorful and illuminating gateway to leisure, Leisure Lives monumentalizes the legacy of the Black pioneers that fiercely protected public space dedicated to Black rest. Activated by the artist’s accompanying performance Swag Surf in the Water, Breon imagines this public space as an invitation to claim and reclaim space for relaxation.
Autumn Breon imagines her work as immersive invitations for the public to join in the reimagining and creation of systems that make current oppressive systems obsolete. Breon has created commissions for Art Production Fund, Frieze Art Fair, and the ACLU of Southern California. Breon’s performance history includes Hauser & Wirth, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the Water Mill Center.
She is an alumna of Stanford University where she studied Aeronautics & Astronautics and researched aeronautical astrobiology applications. Breon is a recipient of the Crenshaw Dairy Mart Fellowship for Abolition & the Advancement of the Creative Economy and the Race Forward Fellowship for Housing, Land, and Justice.