Alison Elizabeth Taylor

Alison Elizabeth Taylor is an artist known for transforming the historic technique of marquetry or wood inlay into a new form: marquetry hybrid—a novel synthesis of media and process that incorporates inlaid wood, painting, and collaged textures to create a new perspective on painting. Taylor casts a critical and compassionate eye across the breadth of contemporary American experience in works that depict the changing Southwestern landscape and the rural survivalists, hedonists, squatters, and economic misfits of late American capitalism who inhabit it. Taylor pays respect to the innate humanity of her subjects through her choice of this extraordinarily demanding medium. A native Nevadan who grew up through boom and bust cycles in Las Vegas, Taylor derives her tableaux from direct observation. There is a volatile tension between the surface and the subject; as she explains, “The natural beauty inherent in finished wood draws attention to themes more subtle or complex. The splendor of the shellacked wood is an invitation to look at subjects the viewer might otherwise ignore.” 

In September 2017, Alison Elizabeth Taylor’s Reclamation, a room-sized permanent installation, opened at the Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Center at the new Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island, NY. Reclamation is an architectural space on the verge of giving way to the forest. Taylor writes, “Nature never pauses in its race to reclaim, and innovation is the human response against this flow towards entropy. The continual churn of the cycle between nature and human endeavor stands at the core of this work.”

Raised in Las Vegas, Nevada, Alison Elizabeth Taylor received her M.F.A. from Columbia University Graduate School of the Arts in 2005. Alison Elizabeth Taylor: The Sum of It, a major traveling survey exhibition at the Des Moines Art Center in Des Moines, IA, opened in October 2022. The show, which was accompanied by a catalog, traveled to the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA in February 2023. Additional solo exhibitions include: These Days, James Cohan, New York (2023); Future Promise, James Cohan, New York (2021); The Needle’s Eye, Zidoun & Bossuyt, Luxembourg (2019); The Backwards Forwards, James Cohan (2017); Musée Historique, Chateau de Nyon, Switzerland (2015); Surface Tension, James Cohan (2013); Un/Inhabited at SCAD, Savannah and Atlanta, GA (2010); Foreclosed, James Cohan (2010); Alison Elizabeth Taylor, James Cohan (2008); Idyll, James Cohan (2006). 

Important group shows include: The Outwin 2022: American Portraiture Today, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC (2022); Reflections on Perception, Akron Art Museum, Akron, OH (2022); We Are Family, New York Academy of Fine Arts, New York, NY (2022);The Slipstream: Reflection, Resilience, and Resistance in the Art of Our Time, Brooklyn Museum, NY (2021); Personal Space, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2018); Makeshift, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, WI (2018), curated by Michelle Grabner; I See Myself in You: Selections from the Collection, Brooklyn Museum (2016); Crafted: Objects in Flux, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA (2015); First International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Cartagena de Indias, Cartagena, Colombia (2014); Branching Out: Trees as Art, Peabody Essex Museum, MA, (2014); BEYOND EARTH ART: Contemporary Artists and the Environment, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, NY (2014); Unfolding Tales: Selection from the Collection, Brooklyn Museum (2013); Surface Value, Des Moines Art Center, IA (2011); 185th Annual: An Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art, National Academy Museum, NY (2010).

In 2022, Taylor received the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition Prize. Taylor's winning work, Anthony Cuts under the Williamsburg Bridge, Morning, 2020, was featured in The Outwin 2022: American Portraiture Today, a major exhibition that was on view at the National Portrait Gallery from April 2022, through February 2023. In 2009, Taylor received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award and the Smithsonian's Artist Research Fellowship Program Award. Selected permanent collections include: Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA; Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, AZ; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA; Hood Museum, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL; and The Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH. Taylor lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.