Taylor Renee Aldridge
2017-2018
Invited Guest - Public ProgrammingIn this Spring 2018 talk, “Performing Interior Pleasure: The Somatic Work of Jennifer Harge,” Taylor Aldridge put the pleasure work of dancer Jennifer Harge in conversation with black feminist theories of erotics, freak technique, and ecstasy to identify contrasts between the "specifically honed craft" and the seemingly pejorative "freak-ish" nature of queer Black vernacular dance.
About the ProgramTaylor Renee Aldridge is the visual arts curator and program manager at the California African American Museum (CAAM). Prior, she worked as a writer and independent curator in Detroit, Michigan. She has organized exhibitions with the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit Artist Market, Cranbrook Art Museum, and The Luminary (St. Louis). In 2015, along with art critic Jessica Lynne, she co-founded ARTS.BLACK, a journal of art criticism for Black perspectives. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, The Art Newspaper, Art21, ARTNews, Frieze, Harper's Bazaar, Canadian Art, Detroit MetroTimes, and SFMoMA’s Open Space.
Taylor is the recipient of the 2016 Andy Warhol Foundation Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant for Short Form Writing and the 2019 Rabkin Foundation Award for Art Journalism. She has earned a M.L.A from Harvard University with a concentration in Museum Studies and B.A from Howard University with a concentration in Art History.
Taylor has recently organized the exhibition Enunciated Life, which will open at CAAM in Fall 2020. Enunciated Life and its epilogue Inspirited: Coda (opening at Red Bull in Spring 2021), utilize Black spiritual beliefs as a point of departure for considering modes of surrender, looking at the movements, sounds, and corporeal expressions that have generated lexicons of communication within and beyond Black church sites. You can find a site of annotations for both shows here.
BiographyPast Programs