May 8–June 19, 2021
Steve Turner is pleased to present a river gets wide, a solo exhibition by New York-based Kiyomi Quinn Taylor that features three new paintings which combine drawing, painting and collage to create fantastical scenes of herself and family members. She utilizes an archive of family photographs of African American and Japanese relatives as well as episodes of family lore to represent anxiety, one that relates both to the uncertainty of the future and the brutality of the past. Of the three paintings, Taylor wrote: Happy Birthday, Baby shows me as a baby inside a peony bush. Roz, one of the many women who raised me, sits behind me smiling. The painting represents the nourishment of wisdom, knowledge, and affection provided by mother-figures. The background scene shows my father carrying the head of his dead brother like a football to suggest that death and danger are never far off. Fortune Telling Groupers at Chill Phi Chill depicts three party-goers and three fish inside a red bathroom. The setting was inspired by stories my father told me of his experiences at Florida A&M University, an historically Black university, where he and his friends enjoyed a concoction of grain alcohol and kool-aid in their invented fraternity of Chill Phi Chill. The slippery fish represent the anxiety of an unknown future. Swimming Upstream shows my grandmother as a gargoyle on the edge of a building that overlooks a cityscape. My grandmother, in old photographs, often wore an expression that I have come to characterize as “existential exhaustion.” I also depict myself, huge and red, scaling a building in the distance with smoke rising nearby from an unknown calamity. The painting considers the position of my departed grandmother, imagining her to have a glorious view of my life’s constant chaos. Kiyomi Quinn Taylor (born 1995, South Orange, New Jersey) received a BFA from New York University (2017) and an MFA from Columbia University (2020). She has presented work in group exhibitions since 2016. a river gets wide is Taylor’s second solo exhibition at Steve Turner. Kiyomi Quinn Taylor creates works that combine drawing, painting and collage to form fantasy narratives which conflate family history with dinosaurs and Star Trek. She utilizes an archive of family photographs from the 1950s to 1970s which features African American relatives in New York, and Washington State and Japanese ones in Fukuoka, Japan. To Taylor, dinosaurs represent anxiety, one that relates both to the uncertainty of the future and the brutality of the past, and Star Trek represents the magic of a future fantasy. By juxtaposing emotionally-charged fictional and factual and imagery, Taylor collapses time along psychic, genetic, and poetic lines. Born 1995, South Orange, New Jersey Education 2017 Solo Exhibitions 2020 Group Exhibitions 2020 2019 2017 2016 Grants and Awards 2017 2016 Bibliography 2020
Lives and works in New York
2020
MFA, Columbia University, New York
BFA, New York University, New York
2021
a river gets wide, Steve Turner, Los Angeles
Dream Logic, Steve Turner, Los Angeles
2021
Columbia MFA Thesis Exhibition, Wallach Gallery/Lenfest Center for the Arts, New York (upcoming)
No Longer, Not Yet, Essex Flowers, New York
Say It Loud, Christie’s, New York
Alone Together, Steve Turner, Los Angeles
m.i.o.k. Leroy Neiman Gallery, New York
Whams of Summer, Ki Smith Gallery, New York
Aesthetically Functional Only, Edsel William/The Fireplace Project, New York
Columbia University MFA First-Year Exhibition, Wallach Art Gallery, New York
All Art +, Van der Plas Gallery, New York
Open Stacks: BFA Thesis Exhibition, NYU Commons Gallery
Systems Flow, 80 WSE Gallery, New York
Preservation and Parafiction, NYU Commons Gallery
Back Story, SMI Virginia S Block Gallery, Montclair, New Jersey
2019
Helen Frankenthaler Painting Award
Brevoort-Eickemeyer Fellowship
Andrew Fisher Fellowship
Art & Art Professions Department Award, NYU
NYU Curatorial Collaborative Senior Honors Exhibition
2021
Stephanie. “Kiyomi Quinn Taylor,” Zephyr Art Collective, January 8
Sheets, Hilarie M. “Newly Minted Artists, Facing a Precarious Future, Take Action,” The New York Times, May 19
