The foundation of Autumn's work isn’t just protest or trauma. It’s a living, very modern strategy: to take any experience, even the ones that erase or diminish you, and turn it into strength. Autumn is an artist, performer, and researcher who’s just released her own 40-card oracle deck. These cards are a direct response to everyday microaggressions and identity erasure. Their whole point isn’t just to reflect reality, but to turn it into a new kind of game — to build personal boundaries and support yourself through humor, especially when anger just isn’t enough anymore.

Autumn Breon is a Stanford grad, a former aerospace engineer, now an artist and researcher whose work has been shown at Hauser & Wirth, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Frieze, and the ACLU. She works right at the intersection of performance, public art, and social research: her projects — from Leisure Lives to Everyday Oracle and Swag Surf in the Water — aren’t just about art, but about rethinking time, labor, rest, and the right to public space for Black women.

What makes her approach special is that she literally turns dry stats and lived trauma into collective healing art: the women who take part in her actions become co-authors, and even get royalties from the digital versions of their words. Breon calls her practice “radical spectacle,” creating projects that aren’t about fighting the system so much as making old structures obsolete — through beauty, humor, and community.

That’s exactly why I wanted to show Autumn’s voice not as a cut-up interview, but as a complete story — to keep the honesty, the tone, and the motivation that drives her work. Because behind every one of her projects isn’t just a challenge to the system, but a really practical question: if not by resistance, then how do we actually survive and change?

What follows — it’s her voice: uncut, unpolished, and exactly the way she thinks: sharp, grounded, and strangely hopeful.

We shaped our conversation into a single flow so you can hear the logic behind her work — not as Q&A, but as a worldview.

"Beauty is how we survive.
A commitment to beauty is a commitment to using what is dealt to you to create something better. Beauty will always be radical because it keeps us oriented toward possibility. I think beauty teaches us to see beyond crisis and touch a future that wants us to thrive.

In Everyday Oracle, I turn microaggressions into messages of wisdom and humor. Every time I shared a microaggression I’d received, my friends shared their own stories. Hearing the patterns made the whole thing feel absurd. Something as unfounded as someone being shocked that you’re “articulate” doesn’t deserve the fuel of a combative response. If harm in that form receives any response, humor feels sharper and more honest. At the same time, the impact of those moments can be heavy. I needed a container with more room than confrontation and the reference to tarot was kinetic, interactive, and familiar. It let the transformation feel playful while still holding the weight of the experience.

I see rest as a political act.
I appreciate how Tricia Hersey’s work and her book Rest is Resistance discuss the truth about rest. Black rest has been criminalized for generations and that history lingers. I wish rest could stand as a basic human need, but in a world where exploitation is routine, rest becomes a disruption. It interrupts systems that rely on our exhaustion and visualizing that interruption matters in my work because it asserts ownership of our bodies and our time.

It clicked when I realized numbers can document care and harm with the same force as any image or object. Data has always been an intuitive way for me to make sense of the world. Data can ignite rage or offer comfort because it delivers a snapshot of truth with precision. Once I understood that, I began to treat data like texture. I let it shape the tone and movement I choose in the same way a material would. I think about W.E.B. Du Bois’ infographics at the Paris World Fair in 1900 and how he turned data into clarity. That lineage made it easy for me to see data as emotional material and not just information.

The obsolescence of oppressive systems would look like structures that collapse because people no longer need them. Communities would rely on care and shared resources instead of punishment or scarcity. Public space would be designed for gathering without surveillance. Our current broken institutions would lose power because we would build better ones. Our systems would support life.

My educational background trained me to think through the scientific method. Answering even the biggest questions starts with a hypothesis and a set of steps. That mindset shaped how I build my work. I approach large social problems the same way I approached engineering projects. I break them down, test ideas, study the variables, and design toward a clear result. At the same time, space exploration gave me a sense of scale and a sense of possibility. It pushed me to treat freedom as something that can expand across time and across worlds. That perspective keeps my imagination wide and keeps my work oriented toward futures that reach beyond the limits we inherit. Freedom for me is the ability to jump timelines and fold histories.

I believe that’s how we stretch possibility."

Autumn doesn’t just prove that beauty is about survival, not escaping reality. Her practice is a living example of how even the most devalued or traumatic experiences can become the groundwork for creation, for building new strategies of care, humor, and resistance. She never criticizes just for the sake of it — her approach is always about action: how to actually make old structures irrelevant. And maybe the main lesson here is that real freedom doesn’t start with resistance, but with building your own foundations — through community, knowledge, creativity, and, yeah, through beauty you don’t have to explain to anyone.

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Photo Credits: Ella Hovsepian, Giovanni Solis