Autumn Spears

DIGITAL RESIDENTS \ OCTOBER 2027

Autumn Spears is a Washington, DC–based multidisciplinary artist whose work explores inheritance and the formation of identity within the African American experience. Through layered mixed media works, she examines how memory, ritual, and inherited histories shape the ways individuals and communities define themselves across generations.

Drawing from personal archives, domestic spaces, and diasporic histories, Spears creates works that consider how culture is carried, fragmented, and remade over time. Her use of material, pattern, and repetition reflects an ongoing interest in inheritance—not only as lineage, but as a lived and evolving condition.

Spears received her BFA in Art Education from Albright College in 2020. In 2023, she held her inaugural solo exhibition, Becoming, at the Freedman Gallery. Her work has been exhibited at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives, Anacostia Arts Center, and the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum. She is a 2025 grant recipient of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, which acquired her work for the Art Bank collection in 2025.