Taylor Keister (b. 1994, Horseheads, NY) is Brooklyn based artist working as a painter and up-cycles handbags and garments on the side. Taylor graduated with an MFA from Alfred University (2020), where she later went on to teach Painting. Her studies brought her to Düsseldorf, Germany under Professors from the Kunstakademie. Taylor also fulfilled a residency at the Chateau Orquevaux in France, just months before moving to Brooklyn in 2022. 

Taylor Keister’s multidisciplinary practice exists in themes of domesticity, childhood trauma, and the plasticity of hyper-femininity. Through a commercialized and kitschy vocabulary of color, pattern, and repetitive motifs, she creates altar pieces where the intricate frames are direct references to the figures, environments, and storylines that they house. Each existing in their own world of ritualistic masking, hysteria, and sacrificial decoration. In a harmony of contradictions, the paintings are both rejections and “one-arm-hugs” to growing up in a small conservative suburb. They’re playfully pitiful, hidden in delusion and submitting to Stepford Wife tendencies. The invented absurdity and shallowness of both the figure and their environment simultaneously compliment and challenge traditional views on womanhood, with an emphasis on the robotic monotony and maintenance of one’s self image and a clean reputation.