MICHAEL K. TAYLOR

Michael Kahlil Taylor is a artist, curator, and poet based in Houston, TX. Both his artwork and performance poetry have been exhibited and published through traditional and digital media for over the past decade. Taylor graduated from Houston’s High School for Performing and Visual Arts and received his B.F.A in Photography/Digital Media from the University of Houston in 2003.Taylor’s work in visual media range from photography and short films to intimate drawing and engraved paintings on wood. He begins his artwork in 2008 with mixed media explorations into how memory, perception, and imaginative ideas are expressed through action or inaction. He is very interested in creating a visual language showing connections between various elements of life using both image and text.

Taylor’s artwork has lead to awards and recognition such as 2008 Individual Artist Grant recipient (HAA,) Houston’s 2007 MFAH 5a Catalog Cover Art Selection, 2005 Poetry Grand Slam Champion, and Houston 1997 NAACP ACT-SO Art Video Winner.

Visual artist and spoken word poet Michael Kahlil Taylor is building dual multimedia installations titled MourningSunrise and Analog Allusions.

Analog Allusions (Analogue Illusions) explore how creativity shifts the multilayered realities of individuals and their immediate environment through visual narratives. Photography, painting, writing, sound, space and time are both mediums and subjects in an evolving instillation. “Do you create your reality, or exist within the confinements others have created for you?” – Taylor

MourningSunrise invites the viewer into a personal instillation centered around the recent Post-Katrina loss of New Orleans’ musician Eluard Burt and the family history Taylor has uncovered over the past few years. Through video, mixed-media photography, and metaphoric objects, he shares personal family narratives and history from Katrina survival back through the 1800’s.

Taylor’s dual exhibition is funded in part by the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance’s 2008 Individual Artist Grant.

My work for the upcoming exhibition will communicate intergenerational personal narratives of individuals from the 3rd Ward community. Using multimedia such as poetry, photography, audio and video, the final works will be used to map the area based on paths traveled within the narratives.