LIGHT, COLOR AND DESIRE

JANET TAYLOR PICKETT: Memories and Desire May 27 - September 3, 2023 Oceanside Museum of Art
JANET TAYLOR PICKETT: Light, Color and Desire

May 27 – September 3, 2023

Oceanside Museum of Art

Light, Color and Desire presents the art of Janet Taylor Pickett, whose pathbreaking work explores Blackness, identity, and history.   A focused solo exhibition of nearly thirty (30) paintings and combines produced between 2003 and 2023, Light, Color and Desire  coronates the artist, as a synecdoche for all women, as  a contemporary goddess who reigns over fertility, fecundity, and embodied experience.  This mythology of Self reaches its apotheosis in Taylor Pickett’s luminous portraiture. Emanating expectancy and resolve, the subjects appear as incarnations of an ongoing desire for social, sexual, and spiritual freedom that is personal and universal. Polemical, unique, politically and socially committed, the art included in Light, Color and Desire demonstrates Taylor Pickett’s arrival at a distinct narrative voice inspired by Johannes Vermeer, Henri Matisse, and Frida Kahlo.

Janet Taylor Pickett was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1948, the third generation in her maternal family to be raised in that city, which was a stop on the Underground Railroad. Her father, Dempsey Taylor Jr., was born in Brownsville, Tennessee and travelled north during the Great Migration, settling with his family in Ypslanti, Michigan. This imbrication of personal and shared Black History is concealed in Taylor Pickett’s work, which pours forth from an arduous path sowed with the sorrow of memories and a sea of desires. In particular, Janet Taylor Pickett’s becoming was influenced by Romare Bearden, whose collaged elements became the bedrock of her own work, situating her as a celebrated collagist.

LIGHT

Janet Taylor Pickett has always been intrigued by light, a preoccupation that she shares with Johannes Vermeer (1632 – 1675). Vermeer implemented camera obscura and applied layers of shadow to achieve the effect of an illuminated subject emerging from the darkness. Taylor Pickett begins with a full composition and then engages color blocking, leaving light to illumine her central subject. Neither plaintive nor condemning, the subjects seem to gaze both inwards and outwards, beholding internal and external topographies with poise and depth. In The Artist Unmasked (2021), the steadfast female gaze belies colossal emotions that the subject restrains. The expression harbors a universal vulnerability; an imperative grace under pressure that a (white) culture expects Black women to retain. This self-possession within constriction also figures in the painting Ladies in Waiting (1981), where the artist is framed by luscious, magenta walls. The light-infused domestic interior pulses with a celestial buoyancy, as though the space hums with ethereal hymns.

COLOR

Light, Color and Desire positions Janet Taylor Pickett as a colorist: an artist keen to the affordances of each hue, and how they inter-animate each other. Taylor Pickett forgoes neutral tones in favor of a kaleidoscopic color scheme, which conjures mood, light and space. Her saturated palette and enlistment of cutouts highlights her dialogue with Henri Matisse (1869 -1954). In The Ritual (2003), an amalgamation of painted and collaged elements, Taylor Pickett recruits cutout dress forms, which augment and amplify Matisse Cutouts. The work curates an altar that colligates a European reference (a painting by Fra Angelico) to African ones: hennaed hands and a fertility figure ringed with a golden aureole. Its display of talismanic forms and Christian iconography renders the work an homage to Black faith and a votive in its own right.  Taylor Pickett’s Indigo Blue further highlights her visual dialogue with Matisse (Prussian) Blue. This deep affinity for Blue is enacted in Memory of Water II (2021), which substantiates the ever-present call and response water has had in the collective history of African Americans. Water symbolizes the flow of memory from the Nile, to the Mississippi River to the Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean; it is the genetic rhythm of memory that water holds.

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.

Janet Taylor Pickett is utterly authentic in her vision and scope: an expression of a life being led in pursuit of psychical, spiritual and aesthetic liberation. It marks her as a vessel for femininity writ large—a contemporary goddess whose beauty and power supercharges life itself. While Taylor Pickett approaches the present as a benediction, she also presides over the past. History suffuses her art. As sustained visual poems, the paintings and combines in Light, Color and Desire probe a personal and collective past to posit a distinctly Black mythology of Self. Taylor Pickett’s work is a serious intellectual interrogation of beauty, nature and emotions that enables her recognition at the fore of Contemporary Art. Imbued with the mysticism of devotional work and the enigmatic lyricism of folklore, Janet Taylor Pickett paints as she emotes.

Dr. Jennifer Baahng, Guest Curator

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JANET TAYLOR PICKETT: NECESSARY MEMORIES

Janet Taylor Pickett, Melon Dress, 2001, oil, charcoal, oil stick and collage on canvas, 60 x 40 in
JANET TAYLOR PICKETT: NECESSARY MEMORIES

March 15–April 28, 2023

Amelie A. Wallace Gallery, SUNY College at Old Westbury

Necessary Memories is a solo exhibition of Janet Taylor Pickett that explores her sustained engagement with identity, heritage, and the complexity of lived experience. The exhibition is presented on the occasion of the inauguration of the Black Studies Center and the Black Studies major at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, an initiative representative of the College’s strong social justice mission and racial diversity. A survey of the artist’s prolific body of work from 1972 to 2021, the exhibition showcases over fifty (50) works that externalize the interior life of Janet Taylor Pickett. Intimate and confessional, Necessary Memories pinpoints moments of tension in competing desires for rootedness and freedom. Replete with visual motifs, Janet Taylor Pickett draws on personal biography as a compass to chart a path towards a broader collective heritage that prompts imaginative sustenance for the present.

Janet Taylor Pickett was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1948, the third generation in her maternal family to be raised in that city, a stop on the Underground Railroad. Her father, Dempsey Taylor, Jr., was born in Brownsville, Tennessee, and traveled north during the Great Migration, settling with his family in Ypsilanti, Michigan. This imbrication of personal and shared Black history, concealed in Taylor Pickett’s birthplace, is central to her work. Attuned to the socio-political affordances of her practice, she wields her art as activism: a cautionary tale about the recalcitrance of historical trauma on both the individual and national psyche. Combining quilted constructions, sculptural works, and storytelling through images and handwritten texts, the artist conjures the past with ease, galvanized by her embrace of frustration and pain, and her reckoning with struggle as a touchstone for healing.

HERITAGE

Janet Taylor Pickett’s excavation of her heritage finds its beginnings in her 1972 MFA thesis at the University of Michigan, entitled, black art: reviewing its roots. This project catalyzed the artist’s activist concerns that became the conceptual framework for her artmaking. Adinkra, emblazoned on the book’s cover, was developed by the Ashanti tribes to symbolize various natural and metaphysical concepts. Mobilizing African visual poetics, Taylor Pickett reconceptualizes the relationship between text and image, narrative and myth—tensions and interchanges throughout her art practice.

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.

IDENTITY

While deep historical roots and the traditions of Janet Taylor Pickett’s ancestors are at the fore of her conceptual concerns, she assembles these histories to investigate her identity. In “Melon Dress” (2001), the artist enlists a dress form patterned with watermelons and cotton tufts, pejorative symbols yoked to the trauma of slavery, as a metaphor for selfhood. A scroll wraps around the dress featuring text from Larry Vincent Buster’s The Art and History of Black Memorabilia (2000) that elucidates the historical significance of the watermelon:

Watermelon is believed to have originated more than 4,000 years ago in southwestern Africa, where it provided a ready-made water canteen.

It’s high in nutrients and low in calories—just the kind of food to keep slaves alive aboard ship during the transatlantic passage from Africa.

The artist’s figuration of the written word further underlines the socio-historical charge of her work; in coopting and retooling traumatic history by way of watermelon and cotton, she generates a new personal mythology that combines words and repeating visual motifs to forge an alternative canon.

Identity is also a central theme in “An Odyssey” (2014-2015), Taylor Pickett’s milestone wall installation, comprised of over fifty (50) dress forms. Deeply influenced by the color and textiles of Henri Matisse (1869-1954), the artist made cutouts as open secrets; portals to the past that declare their story through a mixture of photographs and collages, while retaining a patina of mysticism and abstraction. Solemn and meditative at times and buoyant and animated at others, the works are, she contends, “conduits and vessels of meaning…visual records, captured memories, observations, and inspirations.” Each dress form cutout compels the viewer to consider its interrelated images, as a myriad of stories reveal themselves. An Odyssey is a matrix for Taylor Pickett’s creative process, a conceptual tool to examine identity politics, and a vessel for transformation.

The artist’s quest to unpack the ancestral heritage nestled in her identity manifests in “Hot House” (1996). An oil painting with collage elements on combined un-stretched canvases, the work is an amalgamation of the artist’s philosophical and aesthetic preoccupations in the early 1990s. Teeming with verdure that presses out of the frame with an anthropomorphic aliveness, the work asserts sexuality, sensuousness, and nature. It bears the influence of Taylor Pickett’s creative conversant, Sam Gilliam (1933-2022), with whom she worked at the Vermont Studio School in 1991. Gilliam, known for his “Drape Paintings,” encouraged Taylor Pickett to “get off the canvas” and wrestle with the inchoate three-dimensionality in her work. A turning point in Taylor Pickett’s practice, the conversation instilled in her a sense of liberation that was as emotional as it was formal.

COMPLEXITY OF LIVED EXPERIENCE

Engaging with beauty and the difficulty of embodiment, Janet Taylor Pickett produces work that speaks to the complexity of lived experience. Art’s capacity to function as a totalizing enactment of life is most acutely evident in her fabric constructions, which she began making after her father’s death in 1992. Quilted on felt, “Healing Shirt” (2007) demonstrates a striking tactility and weight. Its display of talismanic forms and Christian iconography renders the work both an homage to Black faith and a votive object in its own right. In its immersive humanism, Taylor Pickett’s oeuvre resonates with German performance artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986). Beuys, who constructed environments out of felt and other materials, was enraptured by the ritualistic interactions created by participatory art. Similarly energized by the metaphysical transmissions afforded through visual work, Janet Taylor Pickett affirms art as healing; a channel to a realm deeper and more expansive than the purely visible world. Beuys’ notion of art as a “social sculpture,” a shared Happening that can reshape society and culture, is taken up by Taylor Pickett. The artist uses Blackness as a “social sculpture”; her embodied experience as an African American person is her art.

Aesthetic and existential arrival are realized in “She Blooms in Her Own Time” (2021). [Pic 7] This self- portrait enacts 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, seeing through and beyond the viewer. Flanked by slabs of saturated color, she deploys orange burnt sienna, the skin tone that resembles her father’s tanned forearm, and that she uses to depict all of her subjects. While Matisse clearly figures as a creative interlocutor, the work is utterly authentic in its articulation of Taylor Pickett’s distinct narrative voice. As the conceptual linchpins of the exhibition, “Healing Shirt” and “She Blooms in her Own Time” confer that Necessary Memories is seeing the life of Janet Taylor Pickett. These two works posit the convergence of the artist’s social, ethical, and metaphysical commitments with her blossoming as an artist. As she erases boundaries to create work that is relatable and transcendental, Taylor Pickett offers a visual scripture that is entwined with her own becoming.

Necessary Memories affirms how art is a physical experience, and a public one—an impulse that is intuitive, introspective, and geared towards the world outside oneself. Sensitive and visceral, Taylor Pickett delivers a narrative of mythic proportions through her radiant, experimental, and intensely articulate works. History suffuses Janet Taylor Pickett’s art. As sustained visual poems, the paintings, collages, and sewed works in Necessary Memories probe a personal and collective past to posit a distinctly Black mythology of Self. Multi-textured and multi-dimensional, with vibrant color and unexpected juxtapositions, Taylor Pickett’s work is a serious intellectual interrogation of beauty, nature, and the human condition. Galvanized by the socio-political activities in her formative years, Taylor Pickett began to formulate “an aesthetic language, a visual synergy” that spoke to the demands of the historical moment. The artist’s activist concerns remain a through-line in her practice, as recent paintings build upon the commitments and convictions articulated in her early work. Necessary Memories traces the artist’s swan dive into the murky waters of both her own and her country’s past, and her ultimate resurfacing, clear-eyed, with a deeply embodied sense of truth in her art. Janet Taylor Pickett is the artist, and Janet Taylor Pickett is the oeuvre.

Dr. Jennifer Baahng, Guest Curator

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PITCHES & SCRIPTS

Pitches & Scripts

PITCHES & SCRIPTS

January 20 – March 11, 2023

Jennifer Baahng Gallery is pleased to present PITCHES & SCRIPTS, a group exhibition of works on paper. On view are ink and graphite drawings, collages, inkjet prints and sewed surfaces produced from the 1980’s through 2020. In pooling together six artists, the exhibition pitches a fermentation of ideas, technologies, and political stances that connote rupture and disintegration, while scripting growth, movement and new life. PITCHES & SCRIPTS runs from January 20 through March 11, 2023, with its opening reception on Friday, January 20, 6 – 8 PM.

The spectral presence of history suffuses the work of Janet Taylor Pickett and Zhang Hongtu. Blackness is a “declarative statement” for Janet Taylor Pickett (b. 1948), whose works, as ongoing visual poems,  probe personal and collective memory. Dresses Akimbo, on view, elaborates upon the symbolism of that gesture: a stance of power, bewilderment, and love. A forerunner of Chinese Political Pop Art whose work engages a multilayered discourse,  Zhang Hongtu (b. 1943) asserts themes of dislocation, national identity, propaganda, and politics in the Long Live Mao series, which is equal parts whimsical and profound.

Idiomerica by Sharon Butler (b. 1959) was catalyzed by the artist’s move from New York City to the suburbs. The works investigate the visual grammar of capitalist suburban Americana through video animations, text projects, digital drawings, and the resulting tendencies of reductive art. Conversely, moving from the Midwest to New York City, Jeff Gabel (b. 1968) developed Short Fiction Sketches in scribbly and smudge tone drawings. The works externalize the imagination  of a solitary artist inducted into a sea of uncanny urban experiences.

The Terminal Century by R.C. Baker (b. 1960) seethes with existential angst, as painted and collaged elements tremor with disruption and discordance, while also pointing to the beauty nestled in such moments of ostensive entropy. Similarly responding to a post-War world order, Bjorn Meyer-Ebrecht (b. 1972), makes ink drawings at a monumental scale, creating a pictorial architecture in ink that displays luminous materiality. In their rich, textured surfaces, the works included push the pictorial plane from drawing into painting. 

PITCHES & SCRIPTS assembles the memories of the artists at a formative historical moment, and inquires how art shapes history by responding to cultural shifts or by instigating them itself. As we are flung—‘pitched’—into the future, the exhibition looks to this collection of work for a loose, dynamic script for how to narrativize ourselves in the present.  PITCHES & SCRIPTS renders a ‘soft landing’ for our launch into the new year.

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Pitches & Scripts

PITCHES & SCRIPTS

Group Exhibition
January 20 - March 11, 2023
Sharon Butler

NEXT MOVES

Sharon Butler
Sept 15 - Nov 15, 2022
TANGO | Summer Exhibition | July 13 - August 17, 2022

TANGO

Summer Exhibition
July 13 - August 17, 2022
Pitches & Scripts

PITCHES & SCRIPTS

Group Exhibition
January 20 - March 11, 2023
TANGO | Summer Exhibition | July 13 - August 17, 2022

TANGO

Summer Exhibition
July 13 - August 17, 2022
Pitches & Scripts

PITCHES & SCRIPTS

Group Exhibition
January 20 - March 11, 2023
Pitches & Scripts

PITCHES & SCRIPTS

Group Exhibition
January 20 - March 11, 2023
Zhang Hongtu lectures and exhibits at the Wende Museum

Zhang Hongtu lectures and exhibits at the Wende Museum

November 13, 2022 - March 12, 2023
TANGO | Summer Exhibition | July 13 - August 17, 2022

TANGO

Summer Exhibition
July 13 - August 17, 2022
Zhang Hongtu

VAN GOGH / BODHIDHARMA

Zhang Hongtu
March 25 - April 27, 2022
Zhang Hongtu

If Bison Can Dream by Zhang Hongtu

November 27, 2021 - January 22, 2022
LOVE DIFFERENCE

LOVE DIFFERENCE

Eric Brown, Janet Taylor Pickett, Zhang Hongtu
May 15 - June 15, 2021
SOPHIE MATISSE

MORE THAN ONE WAY HOME

Sophie Matisse
Janet Taylor Pickett
Zhang Hongtu
October 10 - November 24, 2020

TANGO

TANGO | Summer Exhibition | July 13 - August 17, 2022

TANGO

Summer Exhibition

July 13 - August 17, 2022

Romare Bearden
Sharon Butler
Chun Kwang Young
Jeff Gabel
Michael McClard
Mario Merz
Jaye Moon
Mr.
Janet Taylor Pickett
Osvaldo Romberg
David Salle
Zhang Hongtu

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TANGO | Summer Exhibition | July 13 - August 17, 2022

TANGO

Summer Exhibition
July 13 - August 17, 2022
Pitches & Scripts

PITCHES & SCRIPTS

Group Exhibition
January 20 - March 11, 2023
Sharon Butler

NEXT MOVES

Sharon Butler
Sept 15 - Nov 15, 2022
TANGO | Summer Exhibition | July 13 - August 17, 2022

TANGO

Summer Exhibition
July 13 - August 17, 2022
TANGO | Summer Exhibition | July 13 - August 17, 2022

TANGO

Summer Exhibition
July 13 - August 17, 2022
TANGO | Summer Exhibition | July 13 - August 17, 2022

TANGO

Summer Exhibition
July 13 - August 17, 2022
Michael McClard

BIZARRE DELIGHT

Michael McClard
Jan 26 - Feb 28, 2022
Pitches & Scripts

PITCHES & SCRIPTS

Group Exhibition
January 20 - March 11, 2023
TANGO | Summer Exhibition | July 13 - August 17, 2022

TANGO

Summer Exhibition
July 13 - August 17, 2022
TANGO | Summer Exhibition | July 13 - August 17, 2022

TANGO

Summer Exhibition
July 13 - August 17, 2022
TANGO | Summer Exhibition | July 13 - August 17, 2022

TANGO

Summer Exhibition
July 13 - August 17, 2022
snowboard

MR.

Snowboard
MR.

MR.

TANGO | Summer Exhibition | July 13 - August 17, 2022

TANGO

Summer Exhibition
July 13 - August 17, 2022
TANGO | Summer Exhibition | July 13 - August 17, 2022

TANGO

Summer Exhibition
July 13 - August 17, 2022
Pitches & Scripts

PITCHES & SCRIPTS

Group Exhibition
January 20 - March 11, 2023
Zhang Hongtu lectures and exhibits at the Wende Museum

Zhang Hongtu lectures and exhibits at the Wende Museum

November 13, 2022 - March 12, 2023
TANGO | Summer Exhibition | July 13 - August 17, 2022

TANGO

Summer Exhibition
July 13 - August 17, 2022
Zhang Hongtu

VAN GOGH / BODHIDHARMA

Zhang Hongtu
March 25 - April 27, 2022
Zhang Hongtu

If Bison Can Dream by Zhang Hongtu

November 27, 2021 - January 22, 2022
LOVE DIFFERENCE

LOVE DIFFERENCE

Eric Brown, Janet Taylor Pickett, Zhang Hongtu
May 15 - June 15, 2021
SOPHIE MATISSE

MORE THAN ONE WAY HOME

Sophie Matisse
Janet Taylor Pickett
Zhang Hongtu
October 10 - November 24, 2020

Janet Taylor Pickett is featured in For the Culture, By the Culture: 30 Years of Black Art, Activism, and Achievement at the Morris Museum

Morris Museum

Janet Taylor Pickett is featured in For the Culture, By the Culture: 30 Years of Black Art, Activism, and Achievement exhibition at Morris Museum in New Jersey, from May 25 to September 25, 2022.

 

Jennifer Baahng Gallery artist Janet Taylor Pickett’s three works – Melancholy & Memory (2021), Memory of Water II (2021), and Memory of Water III (2021) – are featured in Art in the Atrium’s thirtieth-anniversary exhibition For the Culture, By the Culture: 30 Years of Black Art, Activism, and Achievement at the Morris Museum in Morristown, NJ.  This exhibition is a group retrospective that spans 30 years and highlights established Black artists who have contributed to Black culture by creating impactful works for decades.  The exhibition will run from May 25 through September 25, 2022.   For the Culture, By the Culture showcases 41 works by 19 selected artists: Alonzo Adams, Benny Andrews, Bisa Butler, Leroy Campbell, Elizabeth Catlett, Viki LeBeaux Clark Craig, James Denmark, David Driskell, Jerry Gant, Richard Haynes, Norman Lewis, Russell A. Murray, Rosalind Nzinga Nichol, Janet Taylor Pickett, Faith Ringgold, Joe Sam, Cedric Smith, William Tolliver, and Deborah Willis.  This exhibition is curated by Charles D. Craig, Nette Forne’ Thomas, Onnie Strother with Michelle Graves, Managing Curator, Morris Museum.

For More Information:
https://morrismuseum.org/events/for-the-culture-by-the-culture/

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Janet Taylor Pickett is included in “Prints from the Brandywine Workshop and Archives: Creative Communities” exhibition at Harvard Art Museums.

Harvard Art Museums

“Prints from the Brandywine Workshop and Archives: Creative Communities”

March 4, 2022–July 31, 2022

Harvard Art Museums 

This exhibition marks the first presentation of a group of works acquired in 2018 by the Harvard Art Museums from the Brandywine Workshop and Archives, which is a nonprofit cultural institution that produces and shares art to connect, inspire and build bridges among global communities.  Comprising prints and proofs by nearly 30 artists, the acquisition itself was a cooperative effort between curators and other museum colleagues, as well as Harvard students and professors, who selected works that highlight collaboration and innovation.  Artists in the exhibition: Pedro Abascal, Danny Alvarez, John Biggers, Andrea Chung, Louis Delsarte, Allan Edmunds, Rodney Ewing, Sam Gilliam, Simon Gouverneur, Sedrick Huckaby, Hughie Lee-Smith, Ibrahim Miranda, Tanya Murphy, Kenneth Noland, Odili Donald Odita, Janet Taylor Pickett, Howardena Pindell, Robert Pruitt, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Eduardo Roca Salazar, Juan Sanchez, Clarissa Sligh, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Hank Willis Thomas, Larry Walker, Stanley Whitney, Deborah Willis, and Murray Zimiles.

Images: Courtesy of Harvard Art Museums; © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

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Janet Taylor Pickett’s Hagar’s Dress on view at Telfair Museums

telfair museums
Janet Taylor Pickett’s Hagar’s Dress, 2007, is on view at the Contemporary Spotlight: New Acquisitions from the Brandywine Workshop exhibition at the Telfair Museums from February 4 – May 1, 2022.
The exhibition is an opportunity to celebrate Telfair Museums‘ recently acquired lithographs by Black artists.  This acquisition moves the museum forward in its long-term goal of diversifying the collection and highlighting the works of underrepresented artists and narratives.  Other than two works by noted Georgia-born painter Benny Andrews, these compelling works on paper were created by significant female artists – Faith Ringgold, Deborah Willis, Emma Amos, Selma Burke, Sonya Clark, Gwendolyn Knight, Samella Lewis, Janet Taylor Pickett, Howardena Pindell, Alison Saar, Betye Saar, and Lorna Williams.  Created in the late 20th century and 21st century, these works cover a wide range of timely themes, including the legacies of slavery and racism in the United States, spirituality, education, womanhood, and nature.  They also effectively illustrate the visual, social, and political scopes of the powerfully versatile medium of printmaking.
Images: Courtesy of Telfair Museums

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ARTnews: Janet Taylor Pickett’s Moment to be Seen at Jennifer Baahng Gallery

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NECESSARY MEMORIES

JTP

NECESSARY MEMORIES

Sept 14 – Nov 20, 2021

MEET THE ARTIST:

Sept 15 & 16, 12PM – 3PM

LIVE INTERVIEW:

Janet Taylor Pickett with Marion K. Maneker

Sept 14 at 5PM

Marion K. Maneker is President & Editorial Director of ARTnews, Art in America, and Art Market Monitor

“My Blackness is a declarative statement in my work. There are wonderful, discarded objects brought home by my father and botanical prints my mother found from various secondhand stores. Makers of things and tellers of stories surrounded me. In the late 1960s and early 1970s in the midst of socio-political activities, I began to formulate an aesthetic language, a visual synergy. The symbolism of the African American quilt, the pejorative images of the watermelon became part of my cryptology.”

— Janet Taylor Pickett


NECESSARY MEMORIES chronicles Janet Taylor Pickett’s journey as an artist, showcasing selected works from the 1980s through 2021. Coexisting in her often-ornate paintings and collages is imagery drawn from art history, Africa, America and Europe, present and past wherein linear timeframes and logical geographic or cultural relationships are defied. Bold and unapologetically stated, her lyrical and animated work is a multi-textural exposé referencing her varied experiences. The artist offers a confessional narrative illuminated through images of memory and identity. NECESSARY MEMORIES is a living metaphor of the artist finding her way and establishing her presence in the world. This is Taylor Pickett’s first solo exhibition with JENNIFER BAAHNG GALLERY and her first in New York.


What is evident in both bookends of her ongoing art practice is that Taylor Pickett is a storyteller drawing on and weaving throughout her work vivid overlapping motifs. The black female figure that populates her creations are singular women in a singular time and space, drawing on harrowing tales of the Underground Railroad and her own family’s stories as part of the Great Migration that brought them to the Midwest. Her pathway to becoming an artist was tilled in that verdant soil of memory, reflected in the richness of her palette and the skin tones of her figures. These women are manifestly strong and defiant, a posture evident in their intense gazes and frequently in a stance with arms akimbo, itself a representation of power.   


Metaphor plays a central role in Taylor Pickett’s art. This is most apparent in the prevalence of the dress form in many of her works that serves as a stand-in for female identity and a vessel for memory. Another frequent motif is the watermelon, employed as an evocative and provocative symbol in her compositions. The artist sees this ancient form as “a woman’s fruit–red, juicy, sweet, sensuous, round.” Flora and fauna permeate her compositions as well, surfacing in imaginative forms that contribute to the allegorical nature of her work. In the artist’s use of autobiographical symbolism and engagement with issues of fecundity one finds resonance with the self-portraits of Frida Kahlo.


While Romare Bearden’s influence is reflected both visually and conceptually in Taylor Pickett’s multifaceted collage techniques, she has also found frequent inspiration in her masterful interaction with European “masters.” In the cornucopia of artistic styles upon which the artist draws, one can see in her use of color and form vestiges of Henri Matisse. And the remarkable illumination in Johannes Vermeer’s interior scenes has echoes in Taylor Pickett’s more recent paintings. Her engagement with these artists challenges exclusionary practices of canonical art history, laying claim to her rightful place in this creative dialogue with unique compositions expressing her private and intimate musings in her own distinctive voice.


Revealed in this mosaic of tantalizing work is the way in which memories mold us into what we become. Enchantingly eclectic, NECESSARY MEMORIES is a feast for the eye and the soul. It is a window into Janet Taylor Pickett’s restless inner travels and reconciliation with her personal and inherited past.

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LOVE DIFFERENCE

 

LOVE DIFFERENCE

May 15 – June 15, 2021 

Eric Brown

“My recent paintings were made during a pandemic. Making them was a daily meditative practice. It was like keeping a journal. French philosopher Roland Barthes draws an analogy between text and textiles (“text” comes from the Latin texere, to weave). Through a repetition of mark-making, my paintings appear woven. They are not painted to look like textile. Their appearance is a byproduct of the painting process. The completed painting is a record of my experience making it. The eye follows “threads” of paint, their accumulation creating a larger whole. My new work is paradoxical: slow yet fast, precise yet open, deliberate yet intuitive. I am freer for having made them.”

Janet Taylor Pickett

“My Blackness is a declarative statement in my work. There are wonderful discarded objects brought home by my father and botanical prints my mother found from various second hand stores. Makers of things and tellers of stories surrounded me. In the late 1960’s and early 1970’ in the midst of sociopolitical activities, I began to formulate an aesthetic language, a visual synergy. The symbolism of the African American quilt, the pejorative images of the watermelon became part of my cryptology.”  

Zhang Hongtu

…In Memory of Tseng Kwong Chi (1991) is a photo series that looked to the work of one of Zhang’s contemporaries, the Hong Kong-born performance artist Tseng Kwong Chi, who died of AIDS in 1990. Appropriating Tseng’s photographs, Zhang used the work of his friend to further extrapolate upon the mechanisms by which iconography constructs identity and how artistic intervention can disrupt the language of power. Created for the 1991 exhibition Dismantling Invisibility; Asia and Pacific Island Artists Respond to the AIDS Crisis, Zhang’s work selected fifteen photographs from Tseng’s acclaimed self-portrait series East Meets West (also known as the Expeditionary Self-Portraits, 1979-89) and reconfigured them into photo collages using his familiar epoxy technique. In these photos, Tseng performed the role of “ambiguous ambassador” and posited himself the stereotypical tourist sites (the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Canyon, the Hollywood sign) while dressed in a Mao suit. The series was a subversive yet ludic exploration of cultural identity, perception, and the status of the individual amid the monumental. In Zhang’s reworking of these photos, he cut out the figure of his close friend and colleague, leaving a ghostly silhouette in his absence. The removal of Tseng’s body next to the famous profiles of monuments and natural wonders created a displacement that was not only a deeply sentimental tribute to a dear friend, but, in the words of Zhang, “dismantled” the imagery further, disrupting historical continuity…

“Art and China After 1989, Theater of the World”
Guggenheim 2017
Page 237

https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/art-and-china-after-1989-theater-of-the-world

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