Gage Taylor
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Gage Taylor (1942 – 2000) was a visionary artist known for his psychedelic-inspired landscapes.[1] Art critic Thomas Albright wrote, "Taylor's landscape fantasies combined profuse detail with heavier, painterly surfaces and achieved a 'naive' and nostalgic flavor, like the work of a visionary Grandma Moses."[2]
Baja exhibition
Taylor's art has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum in New York; the Paris Biennalle; the Smithsonian; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the National Museum of American Art; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.[3] Some of Taylor's psychedelic works were printed as posters, including Mescaline Woods and The Road, and Artweek's David Clark estimated that Taylor's reproductions (and those of his compeer Bill Martin), "are on millions of walls throughout the western world."[4] Taylor created the album cover art for The New Riders of the Purple Sage's Brujo, as well as Larry Coryell's Fairyland. Of his own work, Taylor said, "I'm not outwardly political, but I consider my painting to be about the social revolution."[5]
In 1974, Taylor and his peer Robert Moon returned from a short tour of Baja, Mexico, “exulting about the fantastic wilderness they had seen,” according to the Village Voice’s Howard Smith.[6] From that experience, Taylor and Moon submitted a proposal which was accepted by the San Francisco Museum of Art[7] to take a monthlong expedition back to Baja along with four contemporaries: Robert Fried, Gerald Gooch, Bill Martin, and Richard Lowenberg.[8] What resulted was the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's exhibition, Baja, which Artweek's Clark heralded as "a popular success."
