ARTnews: Janet Taylor Pickettās Moment to be Seen at Jennifer Baahng Gallery
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Janet Taylor Pickett is included in Century: 100 Years of Black Art at MAM
February 9 - July 7, 2024
Janet Taylor Pickett “And She Was Born” included in the Phillips Collection Centennial Exhibition and featured on the Cover of the Exhibition Catalogue
SEEING DIFFERENTLY
The Phillips Collects for a New Century
CENTENNIAL EXHIBITION
FEBRUARY 20, 2021 – SEPTEMBER 12, 2021
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Our gallery artist, Janet Taylor Pickett and her work, And She Was Born, 2017, is included in Seeing Differently, the centennial exhibition at The Phillips Collection, marking the first major celebration of the museumās permanent collection in over 10 years. Guided by Duncan Phillipsās belief in the universal language of art as a unifying force for social change, the exhibition presents dynamic and engaging juxtapositions that connect artists past and present across national, racial, and gender lines. Also, And She Was Born is featured on the cover of the exhibition Catalogue, The Phillips Collection in association with Giles 2021 and a multitude of interdisciplinary programs.
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https://www.phillipscollection.org
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Related
Janet Taylor Pickett is included in Century: 100 Years of Black Art at MAM
February 9 - July 7, 2024
Janet Taylor Pickett, āAnd She Was Bornā, currently on view and recently acquired by The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C.
And She Was Born, 2017
acrylic, collage on canvas
30 x 30 in (76 x 76 cm)
Janet Taylor Pickett, āAnd She Was Bornā, currently on view at “RIFFS AND RELATIONS: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition”,Ā and recently acquired by The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C.Ā The exhibition is curated by Dr. Adrienne L. Childs and Janet Taylor Pickett is represented by Baahng Gallery.
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RIFFS AND RELATIONS: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition
February 29 – May 24, 2020
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Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition presents works by African American artists of the 20th and 21st centuries together with examplesĀ by the early 20th century European artists with whom they engaged. This exhibition explores the connections and frictions around modernism in the work of artists such as Romare Bearden, Robert Colescott, Renee Cox, Wassily Kandinsky, Norman Lewis, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Faith Ringgold, Hank Willis Thomas, and Carrie Mae Weems, among others.Ā European modernist art has been an important, yet complicated influence on black artists for more than a century. The powerful push and pull of this relationship constitutes a distinct tradition for many African American artists who have mined the narratives of art history, whether to find inspiration, mount a critique, or claim their own space. Riffs and Relations examines these cross-cultural conversations and presents the divergent works that reflect these complex dialogues.Ā
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Source:
https://www.phillipscollection.org/events/2020-02-29-exhibitions-riffs-and-relations
https://www.phillipscollection.org/multimedia?id=/multimedia/2020-02-29-riffs-audio-tour-stop4
Related
Janet Taylor Pickett is included in Century: 100 Years of Black Art at MAM
February 9 - July 7, 2024
PARADE
PARADE
June 2025
June 5 is World Environment Day, a global day of environmental outreach with a shared mission to safeguard and restore our planet.
BIO:
Sue McNally
Mitten, 2020
Acrylic and oil on canvas
68 x 80 inches
Sue McNally
Snakes And Rivers, 2024
Oil on canvas
90 x 90 inches
June is Pride Month for the LGBTQ + community to commemorate their diversity, recognize their history, and advocate for equality.
Jaye Moon
Love Is All, 2025
āLove is allā in Braille
750 Lego bricks on Plexiglas
15 x 15 x 1.5 inches
Jaye Moon
Fluid Spectrum, 2025
āIdentity is a fluid spectrumā in Braille
800 Lego bricks on Plexiglas
15 x 15 x 1.5 inches
On June 19, Juneteenth celebrates freedom, resilience, and the legacy of African American communities and culture.
Janet Taylor Pickett
Persephoneās Dance, 2023
Acrylic and collage on canvas
47 x 70 inches
Janet Taylor Pickett
Memory Of Water III, 2021
Acrylic and collage on canvas
40 x 62 inches
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JANET TAYLOR PICKETT
Janet Taylor Pickett
In Full Bloom
April – May 2025
In Full Bloom, Janet Taylor Pickett celebrates women, black diasporic culture, and beauty, showcasing selected works from the AKIMBO EXOTICA series produced from 2013 – 2018.Ā A dress form is ubiquitous in these works, structuring her female-centric narratives and histories writ large.Ā A metaphor for Black memory and a symbol of identity, Taylor Pickettās often-ornate works defy linear timeframes and geographic or cultural relationships.Ā Africa and Europe, past and present, coexist in Taylor Pickettās work and continue to explore the eternal black female empowerment through beauty and self-possession.Ā AKIMBO EXOTICA is a portal to the past that declares its story while retaining a patina of mysticism and abstractionāthe ownership of Black beauty.
BIO:
Janet Taylor Pickett
Entering the Geeās Bend, 2013
Acrylic, gouache, watercolor, graphite, photos on Arches paper
30 x 22 in.
Janet Taylor Pickett
The Blooming, 2013
Acrylic, gouache, watercolor, graphite, photos on Arches paper
30 x 22 in.
Janet Taylor Pickett
Mud Cloth, 2013
Acrylic, gouache, watercolor, graphite, photos on Arches paper
30 x 22 in
Janet Taylor Pickett
A Vessel, 2017
Acrylic, gouache, watercolor, graphite, photos on Arches paper
30 x 22 in.
Janet Taylor Pickett
Almaās Garden, 2013
Acrylic, gouache, watercolor, graphite, photos on Arches paper
30 x 22 in.
Janet Taylor Pickett
Indigo Hands, 2018
Acrylic, gouache, watercolor, graphite, photos on Arches paper
30 x 22 in.
Janet Taylor Pickett
Flashes of Joy, 2013
Acrylic, gouache, watercolor, graphite, photos on Arches paper
30 x 22 in.
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PRIDE AND INSOUCIANCE
JANET TAYLOR PICKETT
PRIDE AND INSOUCIANCE
February – April 2024
InĀ Pride and Insouciance, Janet Taylor Pickett’s works serve as a powerful assertion of self-worth and cultural confidence. Resilience and beauty reach a pinnacle in Taylor Pickett’s luminous portraitures. Insouciance mingled with pride, carefree nonchalance balanced by a deliberate indifference to societal expectations, the figures are filled with expectancy and resolve, and embody a continuous longing for social, sexual, and spiritual freedom that is both personal and universal.Ā Pride and InsoucianceĀ is a visual manifesto that encourages a profound exploration of the multifaceted nature of Black experiences. The intentional merging of the traditional and the contemporary speaks to the evolving cultural identity, inviting viewers to acknowledge the richness and complexity inherent in celebrating Blackness.Ā Ā
Janet Taylor Pickett
The Muse, 2023
Acrylic on canvas
48×48 in.
Janet Taylor Pickett
The Liminal, 2023
Acrylic on canvas
48×48 in.
Janet Taylor Pickett
The Enchanted, 2023
Acrylic on canvas
48 x 48 in.
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JANET TAYLOR PICKETT, ZHANG HONGTU, PINKĀ and THE CORPSESāØ
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Madison AvenueĀ New York
Janet Taylor Pickett, Zhang Hongtu,Ā PINKĀ and THE CORPSES
October 5 ā October 31, 2023
R.C. Baker
Eric Brown
Deborah Buck
Bell and Ganassi
Jaye Moon
Mr.
Janet Taylor Pickett
Zhang Hongtu
We are pleased to announce the group exhibitionĀ Janet Taylor Pickett, Zhang Hongtu, PINK and THE CORPSES, which runs from October 5 through October 31, 2023.Ā The exhibition marks the New York premiere of Janet Taylor Pickettās works, previously only shown at the Oceanside Museum of Art in California, that probe a personal and collective past to posit a distinctly Black mythology of Self. Ā
This is also the debut of Zhang Hongtuās never-before-seenĀ Shan ShuiĀ Paintings from his personal collection. Ā ZhangāsĀ Shan ShuiĀ series spans several years and explores the categories of āEastā and āWestā in a distinctive manner, reflecting his life in two cultures. He reimagines the work of seventeenth-century Chinese artists in the vibrant colors and brushwork of Monet and Vincent van Gogh.
On view includes works by R.C. Baker, Eric Brown, Deborah Buck, Bell and Ganassi, Jaye Moon, and Mr. selected from the online exhibitionĀ PINKĀ and THE CORPSES.
WATCH THE VIDEOS
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September 28 ā October 27, 2023
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February 9 - July 7, 2024
PICASSO, WELCOME TO AMERICA
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Madison Ave New York
Picasso, Welcome to America
June 15 ā September 27, 2023
R.C. Baker
Brandon BallengƩe
Romare Bearden
Deborah Buck
Shijia Chen
Billy Copley
Eileen Foti
Bjƶrn Meyer-Ebrecht
Jaye Moon
Pablo Picasso
AndrƩ Raffray
Janet Taylor Pickett
Zhang Hongtu
Every artist since the early 20th century has been influenced by Pablo Picasso. The protean painter/ sculptor/ printmaker/ ceramicist helped define what “modern” art once was – and is still becoming. In 1939, MoMA’s staff was gathering 300 works by the world’s “most famous living artist” (according to the museum’s press release) for Picasso: Forty Years of His Art. A centerpiece of the exhibit was Guernica, his grisaille mural decrying the destruction of the small Basque town by Nazi bombers, in 1937.
Along with Michelangelo and Rembrandt, the name Picasso (1881-1973) has become a synonym – a clichĆ©, even – for āartist.” But none of the artists in Picasso, Welcome to America see the Spanish-born titan as an old hat. Instead, these ten Americans find in the European trailblazer constant inspiration and ongoing challenge. Zhang Hongtu imagines Chairman Mao exposed by glaring illumination similar to the all-seeing lantern in Guernica. Jaye Moon also reimagines Picasso’s anti-war masterpiece, in When Bob Dylan Meets Picasso, Guernica – using Lego bricks in Braille rather than paint.
The bodies and masks in another Picasso touchstone, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), come under scrutiny from Eileen Foti and AndrĆ© Raffray through substitution and homage. Billy Copley finds masks in unlikely surroundings, while Janet Taylor Pickett moves effigies aside to place her powerful female figure at center stage. Deborah Buck turns Picasso’s infamously harsh male gaze around, painting surreal figures that might be asking, “Who’s crying now?ā In Weary of Treading the Earth, from 1945, Romare Bearden, working in watercolor and ink rather than his later signature collage, energizes cubist space with a circus-like palette. R.C. Baker riffs beyond Picasso’s Blue and Rose periods through primary-colored aluminum printing plates. Bjƶrn Meyer-Ebrecht’s dynamic wood and enamel sculpture strips the figure to cubist angles and voids, while Brandon BallengĆ©e searches for animals that, like Picasso’s minotaurs, are no longer with us. Original works by Pablo Picasso will also be on view, commemorating the 50th anniversary of his death.
All of the artists in this exhibition have been influenced by Picasso’s experiments with form and perspective – his breaking of traditional and academic rules. Some of the work here also comments on his darker side, while other pieces engage with the social and political aspects of Picasso’s art. Ultimately, these ten contemporary artists in Picasso, Welcome to America appreciate the formal and aesthetic complexity of a constant innovator. This great artist was effectively barred from ever visiting the United States because he was a member of the French Communist Party. But the joke was on the Feds – Picasso has been in America all along.
VIDEOS
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September 28 ā October 27, 2023
JANET TAYLOR PICKETT: LIGHT, COLOR AND DESIRE
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JANET TAYLOR PICKETT: Light, Color and Desire
May 27 – September 3, 2023
Oceanside Museum of Art
Light, Color and DesireĀ presents the art of Janet Taylor Pickett, whose pathbreaking work explores Blackness, identity, and history. Ā A focused solo exhibition of nearly thirty (30) paintings and combines produced between 2003 and 2023, Light, Color and DesireĀ coronates the artist, as a synecdoche for all women, asĀ a contemporary goddess who reigns over fertility, fecundity, and embodied experience.Ā This mythology of Self reaches its apotheosis in Taylor Pickettās luminous portraiture.Ā 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 inĀ Light, Color and DesireĀ demonstrates Taylor Pickettās 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 Pickettās work, which pours forth from an arduous path sowed with the sorrow of memories and a sea of desires. In particular, Janet Taylor Pickettās 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.Ā Taylor Pickettās 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 Pickettās 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 lifeās 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 largeāa 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 Pickettās 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
Related:
Janet Taylor Pickett is included in Century: 100 Years of Black Art at MAM
February 9 - July 7, 2024
JANET TAYLOR PICKETT: NECESSARY MEMORIES
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JANET TAYLOR PICKETT: NECESSARY MEMORIES
March 15āApril 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 Collegeās strong social justice mission and racial diversity. A survey of the artistās 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 Pickettās birthplace, is central to her work. Attuned to the socio-political aļ¬ordances 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 Pickettās 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 artistās activist concerns that became the conceptual framework for her artmaking. Adinkra, emblazoned on the bookās 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 mythātensions and interchanges throughout her art practice.
Taylor Pickettās 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. āMigration Seriesā (1940-41), Lawrenceās 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 āThe Skin Iām Inā (2016), which reflects Taylor Pickettās belief that simplified forms convey a wellspring of meaning. A spartan composition, āThe Skin Iām Inā 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 Pickettās ancestors are at the fore of her conceptual concerns, she assembles these histories to investigate her identity. In āMelon Dressā (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 Busterās 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.
Itās high in nutrients and low in caloriesājust the kind of food to keep slaves alive aboard ship during the transatlantic passage from Africa.
The artistās 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 āAn Odysseyā (2014-2015), Taylor Pickettās 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, āconduits and vessels of meaningā¦visual records, captured memories, observations, and inspirations.ā 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 Pickettās creative process, a conceptual tool to examine identity politics, and a vessel for transformation.
The artistās quest to unpack the ancestral heritage nestled in her identity manifests in āHot Houseā (1996). An oil painting with collage elements on combined un-stretched canvases, the work is an amalgamation of the artistās 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 Pickettās creative conversant, Sam Gilliam (1933-2022), with whom she worked at the Vermont Studio School in 1991. Gilliam, known for his āDrape Paintings,ā encouraged Taylor Pickett to āget oļ¬ the canvasā and wrestle with the inchoate three-dimensionality in her work. A turning point in Taylor Pickettās 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 diļ¬culty of embodiment, Janet Taylor Pickett produces work that speaks to the complexity of lived experience. Artās capacity to function as a totalizing enactment of life is most acutely evident in her fabric constructions, which she began making after her fatherās death in 1992. Quilted on felt, āHealing 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 Pickettās 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 aļ¬orded through visual work, Janet Taylor Pickett aļ¬rms art as healing; a channel to a realm deeper and more expansive than the purely visible world. Beuysā notion of art as a āsocial sculpture,ā a shared Happening that can reshape society and culture, is taken up by Taylor Pickett. The artist uses Blackness as a āsocial sculptureā; her embodied experience as an African American person is her art.
Aesthetic and existential arrival are realized in “She Blooms in Her Own Timeā (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 fatherās 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 Pickettās distinct narrative voice. As the conceptual linchpins of the exhibition, āHealing Shirtā and āShe Blooms in her Own Timeā confer that Necessary Memories is seeing the life of Janet Taylor Pickett. These two works posit the convergence of the artistās 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 oļ¬ers a visual scripture that is entwined with her own becoming.
Necessary Memories aļ¬rms how art is a physical experience, and a public oneāan 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 suļ¬uses Janet Taylor Pickettās 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 Pickettās 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 āan aesthetic language, a visual synergyā that spoke to the demands of the historical moment. The artistās 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 artistās swan dive into the murky waters of both her own and her countryās 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
Related:
Janet Taylor Pickett is included in Century: 100 Years of Black Art at MAM
February 9 - July 7, 2024