Taylor Ramsey’s expansive watercolor paintings begin and end with storytelling, creating a vibrant visual lexicon that transports viewers into her world. She describes her work as narrative paintings contextualized against architectural backdrops that hold outsized cultural significance in the Black American tradition of storytelling, primarily depicting melanated figures rooted in Black geographical meccas and spaces from her New Orleans background. Through color and pattern as her primary visual language, Ramsey explores storytelling as an act of cultural preservation and celebration, constructing narratives centered around Blackness. Each painting is linked to the next through color, pattern, symbolism, and repeating motifs representing touchpoints of Black cultural history that allude to reimagining prominent Western art merged with staple Black pop culture moments, infused with humor and wit. 

Ramsey’s work is based on extensive research that is an amalgamation of historical art, pop culture, mythology, fables, and the cultural zeitgeist. Drawing influence from her background in 2-D animation, she employs a stylistic approach that infuses flatness, pattern, vibrant color, motif repetition, and text that provides additional signifiers of meaning. The paintings unfold through three narrative anchors: people, place, and purpose. Through this approach, Ramsey transforms fleeting encounters into endearing chronicles, honoring these spaces and giving each figure agency in telling stories of everyday Blackness.

Ramsey (b. New Orleans, LA) grew up in New Orleans and Houston, Texas. Today, she lives and works in Washington D.C. Ramsey has her BFA in Studio Art: Painting and is currently a LeRoy Hoffberger MFA Candidate and Graduate Merit Fellow, has exhibited her work in the African American Museum of Art in Dallas, won the 2024 Mary Castelnovo Award for Painting, and a finalist in the Carroll Harris Simms National Art Competition in 2023.