Austin Thomas is an artist that works in collage, sculpture, social architecture, but over all simplicity.  Her varied performative actions and artworks are broadly described as delineating and creating “social sculpture.”  In homage to Joseph Beuys’s famous formulation and the idea that social systems add up to (or can be rearranged to constitute) one great work of art.  Her 'practice' has included “Perches” (hybrid sculptural/architectural objects around which events are created); an artist-run gallery in Bushwick; a traveling El Camino that provided a moving space for lectures about art in a cross country trip; and many other public actions that have created spontaneous communities around art, discussion, and most recently a camp for kids and adults, called Camp Pocket Utopia (in collaboration with Norte Maar.)

A graduate of NYU, Thomas has been the recipient of several awards, including a recent New York City Percent for Art Commission, a current studio award from from the Elizabeth Foundation, a Public Art Fund Commission, and a sculpture commission from Grinnell College.

Thomas's collages, are deceptively delicate studies, caught sometimes in the act of unfolding against or through the gridded skin of a graph paper background, they explore enduring thoughts about the speciation of drawing and sculpture.

Thomas’s text pieces punctuate this varied practice by adding a relational narrative of overheard public conversations.  In Thomas's works sense falls apart just when it begins to fall together –they're sketches of the way life is, as organisms (like us) negotiate their desires across the permeable borders of being.  In one of her blog posts Thomas writes, “Next up, experiments in and with new and different, reformed, informed and all encompassing forms of selfhood (folded, presented, performed, baked, butted, and drawn crooked).” 

Her work has been exhibited at The Drawing Center, Murray Guy, The Sculpture Center, Art in General and Storefront Gallery (all in NYC), and at the Corcoran Biennial, Washington, DC.  Thomas received press accolades from art critics Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith for her now closed Pocket Utopia Gallery.  She continues to foster community amongst artists through various curatorial projects.

Thomas lives and works in New York City.