Craig Taylor

on sabbatical academic year 2024–25

Craig Taylor earned his BFA from Maine College of Art and his MFA from Yale University. He has had solo shows at March Gallery and Sue Scott Gallery in New York, La Montagne in Boston, CB1 Gallery Los Angeles and Test: Showroom, Berlin. He has contributed work to numerous group exhibitions in such galleries as CTRL Gallery, Houston; 106 Greene, Brooklyn; the Massachusetts College of Art and Fred [London], Leipzig. His work has been covered in Art in America,the Huffington Post, Time Out New York and the Boston Globe. Before joining the faculty at RISD, Taylor taught at the Massachusetts College of Art, Pratt, Brandeis University and Yale University.

Taylor’s continued investigations into painting and drawing offer both the aesthetic experience arrived at through historical approaches to abstraction and the interplay of image associations. Subject matter appears, dissolves and reemerges into a broader meditation on the nature of abstraction and the painted object as emotive. Taylor displays an acute awareness of the conventions and limitations of both abstraction and representation, constructing his work on the continuum between the two experiences. While his work is freighted with a 20th-century American concern for the role and nature of abstract painting, it is simultaneously buoyed by a romantic touch rooted in 19th-century French tradition.