Bio

Taylor Thomas is a Black contemporary artist from Chicago, Illinois. She graduated Magna cum Laude with Distinction from Amherst College where she double majored in Film & Media Studies and Sociology. After receiving her undergraduate degree, Thomas spent 6 years developing feature films at Netflix and The Walt Disney Company. However, witnessing a lack of diversity in the entertainment industry drove Thomas to change career paths and create the representation that she craved in the arts. She’s currently pursuing her MFA in Fine Art at CalArts.

Artist Statement

Thomas’ art is consistently informed by her investigation of family to better understand herself. Like most African Americans, the logistics of tracing her family history is challenging. That gives the photos and stories she does have immeasurable power. Dissecting her subjects from the confines of their picture frames frees them from the boundaries of time. This separation from their historical context allows Thomas the privilege to explore her relationship to family members high atop her family tree by bringing their images into a physical closeness to herself and members of her nuclear family in a way that could never have been possible in real life. 

Two visual keys ground her work - woven grids and organic curves. The woven grid evokes a further extraction of the subject from the context of time and space. The physical restriction of the body created by the grid also parallels the socio-economic restrictions said body faced in daily life. Exploring this idea further, she creates grids from found street posters to allude to the consumerism that her subjects were often excluded from. By abstracting the advertisements into a weave with her subject, they are forced to converse in a language without social hierarchy. Understanding that she can never truly know her subject, the grid also represents a new woven image that interjects Thomas into that person’s history. Together, they make an image for the viewer that is haptic in nature and requires the input of said viewer to reassemble an image of her past and present. In comparison, Thomas uses organic curves and shapes in her work to reflect the fluidity of memory and possibility of mobility. These shapes serve as the connective tissue between generations of parents who did everything to provide better lives for their children. The shapes hold that hope in the energy of their movement as they bloom and grow on the page.

CV

Group Show - “The MFAs of LA” Good Mother Gallery | Los Angeles, CA 2023