DESIRE

Engulfed in flora and fauna, ripe with bold self-possession, the intensely embodied subjects in Janet Taylor Pickett’s work suggest her spiritual linkage to Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), who deployed self-portraiture to explore sexuality, femininity, and her relationship to the natural world. In Forest Born (2022), the roots and curls of flora render an organic issuance from nature. Both artists share an autobiographical narrative that weaves pain and joy to desire. In their political commitments and their unapologetic examination of suffering as well as beauty, they are thematically and aesthetically connected across time and space. Taylor Pickett and Frida Kahlo turn to their own bodies as a site and source of inspiration. While Frida Kahlo lingers on trauma, Taylor Pickett, attuned to life’s difficulties, tributes the beauty of the world and the joy of life. This resiliency and jubilance is personified in the recent painting series Gaia (2022), the goddess of the earth, whose gaze is defiant and searching. The portraits enact the apotheosis of self-actualization; the artist-as-subject is endowed with full agency, and regards the viewer with a gaze that harbors the command of a mystic. As a conceptual linchpin of the exhibition, Gaia confers that Light, Color and Desire is seeing the life of Janet Taylor Pickett.

Taylor Pickett’s thesis was a questionnaire to over three hundred (300) Black artists listed in the Afro- American Slide Depository at the University of Southern Alabama, including Romare Bearden, Benny Andrews, Emma Amos, and Jacob Lawrence, and a compilation of their survey responses. Taylor Pickett and Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) take Blackness as their formal and conceptual subject. “Migration Series” (1940-41), Lawrence’s ambitious, sixty (60) panel work, focuses on the people at the heart of the great Migration, breaking apart the massive relocation into intimate vignettes. In these works, figures and landscapes are reduced to sparse shapes and abstracted figures. This economy of composition also characterizes “The Skin I’m In” (2016), which reflects Taylor Pickett’s belief that simplified forms convey a wellspring of meaning. A spartan composition, “The Skin I’m In” is a non- figurative portrait that deconstructs the female body, casting it as a flat, white dress sewed with beads, collaged with African masks and ridged tribal markings, and set against Matisse Cutout and a cropped photograph of the artist. In aggregate, these sewed surfaces form an epidermis that literally sutures beauty to pain.