project overview
During a residency in The Kitchen’s building at 512 West 19th Street, Autumn Knight created a new project to be viewed by online audiences. This project merged the artist’s practice of improvisation with new text, choreography, and sculpture that responds to the architecture of the space.
Knight worked with Powerhouse Arts to create a series of prints as part of a sculptural installation in dialogue with the architecture of the space at The Kitchen. In this series, the scenes in the work were inspired by The Wiz, a musical adventure fantasy film with an all-Black cast from 1978. Knight explores themes of isolation, anxiety, and gaslighting in this current moment in the United States. The print series was displayed in The Kitchen’s vacant theater, made public to audiences exclusively online, a further investigation into the illusory quality of performance and the dynamics of disappointment as a catalyst for collective action.
The Powerhouse Arts Print Team screen-printed 12, 60” x 48″ digital prints depicting hand gestures rendered in the form of banners on a variety of substrates that included sheer “backlit” satin fabric and clear polycarbonate, allowing for different transparencies and opacities. These banners were suspended from The Kitchen’s theater grid and were also featured in the artist’s video performances live-streamed on The Kitchen OnScreen, the organization’s new website for online programming.
artist biography
Autumn Knight is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation, video, and text. Drawing from her training in theater and drama therapy (MA from NYU), Knight creates performances that reshape perceptions of race, gender, and authority by amplifying the social dynamics between performers and audiences. Her work has been featured in the 2019 Whitney Biennial and at institutions including The Kitchen, Performance Space New York, and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Knight is a recipient of the 2021-22 Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Anonymous Was A Woman Award. Her practice embodies concepts around physical intimacy, power relationships, and Black interiority, often using humor and absurdity as tools for critical awareness and social experimentation.
