A Conversation with Susie Taylor
Thursday, December 28th, 2023
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Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center presents a conversation with Susie Taylor. Taylor is a contemporary textile artist featured in the exhibition Weaving at Black Mountain College: Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and Their Students. In this conversation, Taylor discusses her practice, including her origami weavings, the relationship between her work and abstraction, and her philosophy of structural innovation.

Susie Taylor is a weaver and textile designer based in San Jose, California. A constant and prolific experimenter, Taylor takes an iterative approach to making her work, which she develops in series. By limiting her material palette, Taylor makes structure her primary tool for pictorial expression. Taylor’s process recalls the work of the Black Mountain College weavers in her rigorous approach to experimentation, play, and iterative development. Her work in low relief and three dimensions, inspired in part by origami, also relates to the extended BMC legacy of weaving as practiced by Kay Sekimachi and Trude Guermonprez.

Taylor received her B.F.A. from Kansas City Art Institute and M.F.A. from UCLA and then later earned a Certificate of Excellence (Level 1 Handweaving) from The Handweavers Guild of America. Recent exhibitions include Hardcore Threadlore: Dance Doyle, Terri Friedman and Susie Taylor at Johansson Projects in Oakland, Weaving at Black Mountain College: Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and Their Students at Black Mountain College Museum, and Altered Perceptions: Sarah Hotchkiss, Lordy Rodriguez and Susie Taylor at Institute of Contemporary Art, San José. She has exhibited her work in the US and in international fiberart and contemporary textile biennials in China and Ukraine.

Her work has been seen on Colossal Art and in New American Paintings, The LA Times, American Craft, Fiberarts, Fiber Art Now, The Textile Eye, Complex Weavers Journal, Shuttle Spindle and Dyepot, Handwoven, Journal of Weavers Spinners and Dyers and The Bulletin (Guild of Canadian Weavers), and Weven magazines. She has taught at Penland School of Arts and Crafts, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts and Tyler School of Art.

Photo of Susie Taylor, courtesy of the artist.