Taylor McKimens

Taylor McKimens (born 1976) is an American contemporary artist whose work encompasses drawing, painting, sculpture and installation. Born in Seattle, Washington, and raised in Winterhaven, California, near the Mexican border, McKimens developed a graphic visual language from comics, commercial illustration and the landscape and vernacular culture of the American Southwest. He received a BFA from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena in 1999.

Early life and education McKimens was born in Seattle in 1976 and grew up in Winterhaven, California.

In 2005 McKimens curated Stranger Town at Dinter Fine Art in New York. Writing in The New York Times, Roberta Smith used the exhibition to discuss the increasingly porous boundaries between contemporary art and fields including manga, commercial illustration, animation, skateboarding and independent music. The exhibition included Tomoo Gokita, Daniel Johnston, Rich Jacobs, the Clayton Brothers, Saiman Chow, Mimiyo Tomozawa, Yusaku Hanakuma and Jason Holley.

Also in 2005, McKimens presented one of ten individual solo projects in Art Rock, a public multi-artist exhibition at Rockefeller Plaza, and was included in Greater New York at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, jointly organized with the Museum of Modern Art.

In 2006 PictureBox published McKimens's comic book The Drips. A related exhibition at Clementine Gallery reorganized the artwork used for the comic into a large freestanding installation. From October 2006 to January 2007 McKimens and Misaki Kawai presented concurrent solo exhibitions under the title Boroboro Dorodoro at the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. Reviewing the exhibition in The Japan Times, Samantha Sinnayah discussed McKimens's interest in overlooked decay and his use of painting and life-size paper installation.

McKimens exhibited with Deitch Projects in New York during the 2000s. In 2009 he was included in New York Minute, curated by Kathy Grayson at MACRO FUTURE in Rome; the exhibition traveled in a revised form to Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow in 2011. After Deitch Projects closed in 2010, The Art Newspaper identified McKimens among former Deitch artists continuing to work with former Deitch directors Kathy Grayson and Meghan Coleman at The Hole. McKimens designed the installation for The Hole's inaugural exhibition, Not Quite Open for Business.

In 2014, Peter Saul included McKimens in If You're Accidentally Not Included, Don't Worry About It, Saul's first curated group exhibition.

That year, McKimens also contributed a Rusty Blackbird mural to the Audubon Mural Project in Upper Manhattan.

In 2015, The Hole presented Stoic Youth, a solo exhibition of more than twenty paintings based on two ancient Greek sculptural heads at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Critic Ingrid Dinter described the series as a reduction and distillation of McKimens's earlier visual vocabulary toward abstraction.

The following year, McKimens undertook a month-long residency with Dio Horia in Athens, producing the solo exhibition Swapping Paint. The series continued the Hellenic imagery of Stoic Youth while incorporating colors, materials and visual details drawn from Athens and Mykonos. Later that summer he participated in Greek Gotham in Mykonos, a sixteen-artist exhibition of New York-based artists covered by T: The New York Times Style Magazine.

McKimens later returned to Southern California. In 2022, he participated in New Construction, the inaugural exhibition at The Hole's Los Angeles gallery, which revisited the premise of the gallery's 2010 inaugural New York exhibition. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Work McKimens's work combines graphic drawing with painting, sculpture and installation. Early sources described his constructions as existing between two and three dimensions, and McKimens has explained that his sculptural work developed by cutting drawings away from their backgrounds and allowing them to occupy space independently. and Names of Numbers I (NERO Editions, 2013). In 2024 he contributed the essay "Sacred Clown of the Downtown" to The Brooklyn Rails memorial issue for Donald Baechler.