Visiting Artist Lecture: Taylor Renee Aldridge

Taylor Renee Aldridge is a writer and an independent curator who has dedicated much of her early career to documenting inequities that exist throughout the “art world.” In 2015, along with art critic Jessica Lynne, she co-founded ARTS.BLACK, a journal of art criticism from Black perspectives.

As Aldridge continues to examine dynamics of power and ethics in the arts, she is concurrently pivoting toward queries that concern performance, pleasure, Blackness, and queering of the sacred.

In September 2019, Aldridge curated an exhibition of work by choreographer Jennifer Harge at the Detroit Artist Market, entitled FLY | DROWN. FLY | DROWN, through performance, installation, and a series of salon discussions, celebrates the architectural renderings of Black domestic spaces and how they are utilized to enable fellowship, grieving, pleasure and archive building. She has recently worked as a researcher for the current exhibition on view now at the Cranbrook Art Museum, Landlord Colors: On Art, Economy and Materiality. And Aldridge is the co-curator of the public program component of the exhibition, Material Detroit, which was presented in the Summer of 2019 in Detroit.

Aldridge has held a curatorial position at the Detroit Institute of Arts where she co-curated the exhibition Making Home: Contemporary Works from the DIA, which included work by Carrie Mae Weems, Charles McGee, Lorna Simpson, Tyree Guyton, and Jane Hammond. She has worked at the N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art, the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art, and the National Museum of American History as a Goldman Sachs Junior Fellow.

Aldridge is the 2016 recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant for Short Form Writing and has written for Art21, ARTNews, ContemporaryAnd, Detroit MetroTimes, SFMoMA’s Open Space, and Hyperallergic. Aldridge is a recent recipient of the 2019 Rabkin Foundation Award for Art Journalism. She has earned an MLA from Harvard University with a concentration in museum studies and a BA from Howard University with a concentration in art history.