“I lived, bitch,” was the first text Taylor Simmons sent his best friend after waking up from a three-day coma. On July 6, 2020, Simmons left his house in Brooklyn to grab some food. During the early quarantine, the Atlanta-born artist had grown accustomed to the empty streets, and while biking without a helmet, he was T-boned. His memory of the events is blurry, but the artist, who had sported dreadlocks since he was a kid, recalls pleading with the EMT: “I remember coming to him and saying, ‘Don’t cut my hair!’ and the guy said, ‘We have to,’ and I said, ‘Don’t do it!’”
Four years later, when I visited his Brooklyn apartment and studio this past summer, Simmons reflected on his frightening injuries: a cracked skull, broken ribs, a gap in his teeth, staples across his forehead, and no hair. “I lost my vanity—had a full reckoning of self,” he told me.
Last Time I Checked, 2024
Taylor Simmons
Public Gallery
The accident catalyzed a transformation in the 34-year-old self-taught artist’s approach to his art and life, compelling him to confront the fragility of his identity and career. After recovering, Simmons resigned from his day job—he was working at Ralph Lauren, where he designed window displays. He dedicated himself fully to painting, channeling his existential reflections into his art. The shift fueled his ambition, leading to solo exhibitions at London’s Public Gallery in 2022; the SIXI Museum in Nanjing, China, in 2023; and Helena Anrather in New York in 2024. Simmons is now gearing up for his next show at Public Gallery, slated for 2025.
Just before the accident, Simmons experienced what he described as one of his first “small victories.” During the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, he returned to Atlanta, where he was born and grew up, until 2017, when he moved to East Hampton for a summer before landing in New York City. With a friend’s assistance, he designed a t-shirt featuring a painting of a somber face with lyrics from Houston rapper Scarface: “Imagine peace on this Earth when there’s no grief. Imagine grief on this Earth when there’s no peace.” The shirts, especially the drawing, garnered an unexpected positive response, raising about $3,000 for local initiatives.
Show Some Leg, 2022
Taylor Simmons
Public Gallery
Shortly after, the crash halted his creative pursuits—he couldn’t paint or draw during his recovery. “My brain just wasn’t connecting,” he recalled. Trapped in recovery, Simmons admitted that he became addicted to his phone. Screenshotting as much as he could, he amassed a vast archive of images—from photography collections being sold on eBay to his friends’ Instagram posts. These images, predominantly of Black people, inspire the figurative paintings he makes today. Through translating these images into paintings, Simmons focuses attention on the narratives of often overlooked people.
Growing up, Simmons felt that his own identity as a young Black man was being shaped by external perceptions. “We’re told so much, especially Black men, that we’re viewed on the surface level,” Simmons said. He remembers how school dress codes targeted him and his peers. “When a big Black population moved out to Douglasville [while I was in grade school], that’s when I started to notice dress codes start to turn up; before that, nobody said anything, but if enough Black kids wore something, it was called ‘gang-affiliated.’”
Lovers III, 2021
Taylor Simmons
Public Gallery
Even at home, his father disapproved of his dreadlocks, “because they would have too many connotations.” Simmons added, “I didn’t have to self-identify as a Black man because if I didn’t, I would be told, ‘you’re a Black man.’” Simmons channels these formative experiences and external perceptions of identity into his paintings, exploring the challenges of being viewed through a societal lens.
While working at Ralph Lauren, Simmons met fellow painter Vaughn Spann, who later invited him to contribute works for a show at Half Gallery in 2021 titled “Friend Zone.” The two works by Simmons in the show—1978 Monte Carlo, featuring a man dressed in a white suit looking out a car window; and Lovers, depicting two people kissing (both 2020)—were inspired by his newly amassed photo archive. The artist promised the paintings to friends, thinking they wouldn’t sell. But to his surprise, both did—and they caught the attention of Public Gallery, which hosted his first solo show in 2022.
Simmons joked about how, ahead of that debut solo exhibition, he told the girl he was dating that he was “feeling every feeling all at once,” and she suggested that be his title. “And then the fucking movie came out,” he scoffed (referring to the 2022 film Everything Everywhere All at Once).
In “Everything All At Once,” Simmons put his emotions on the table. The paintings—cinematic scenes exploding with neon colors—brimmed with music references and inside jokes. For example, Whole Lotta Red (2022) features a green suited figure, self-assured and smoking a cigarette on a balcony, a clear homage to Atlanta rapper Playboi Carti’s album of the same name.
The Brutalization Of Rico, 2022
Taylor Simmons
Public Gallery
Humor plays a major role in Simmons’s work. A naturally funny person, he often titles his works in hopes of making his friends laugh—most often geared towards those back home. Featured in the Public Gallery show, The Brutalization of Rico (2022) is named after Soulja Boy’s “Whoop Rico”—particularly referring to a viral dance video that raged across public schools in Atlanta after the song came out. Yet, alongside the humor, these works never stray from addressing real issues, such as racial discrimination and police violence.
This playfulness was distinctly showcased in “Where’s My Hug At?,” Simmons’s solo exhibition at the SIXI Museum last year. The show drew inspiration from the “Where’s My Hug At?” meme, which depicts a man desperately seeking romantic attention. Simmons used the concept to challenge and question traditional performances of masculinity. To Simmons, the phrase is “a thinly veiled request for intimacy” from those unable to ask for it in a patriarchal world.
“I tied it into the whole hero’s journey—like [American literary theorist] Joseph Campbell—and started thinking about this idea of how the hero’s journey aligns with self-actualization of our brains, how we put together who we are and grow into a man,” Simmons said.
This meditative approach was at the heart of Simmons’s solo show with Helena Anrather, “LIMBO = Living Is My Best Option” (which happened to be the now-closed gallery’s swan song). During his early recovery, Simmons turned to old photographs that captured the day-to-day lives of Black individuals navigating the urban landscapes of America from the 1970s through the 1990s. He created 12 paintings that delve into these transient lives, emphasizing the solitude often found within masculinity. This is particularly evident in Up First (2023), which depicts a man sitting on a street corner, staring solemnly at his open hands.
Up First, 2023
Taylor Simmons
Public Gallery
Steppin Out (after Kitaj), 2023
Taylor Simmons
Public Gallery
These paintings are rich with Simmons’s inspirations, often pulled from his lengthy reading list—from Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges to Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino—and famed artists, including R. B. Kitaj. A standout piece from the Helena Anrather show, Steppin Out (After Kitaj) (2023), rests against the hallway in his Brooklyn apartment. The painting portrays a Black man hunched over, a nod to Kitaj’s Golem (1980–81), depicting the Jewish folklore figure that is made from clay to protect the Jewish community. “I basically took Kitaj’s painting of the Golem and used it as a reference to make this painting of the type of guy who you see in New York—the guy who is at every bodega, all the street corners,” he said.
“I paint them in these places and create a myth around them, a mythos or a story around them,” Simmons said of his subjects. “It’s in the same way that musicians sample. When I’m making my paintings, it is taking a reference from somewhere else and putting it into a painting as an invitation for research. It’s an invitation for discovery.”
Where’s My Hug At?, 2023
Taylor Simmons
Public Gallery
Simmons’s existential thoughts have boiled down to a lust for life. He finds beauty—whether surreal or sincere—in his own daily routines and in the lives of the people who populate his found images. This relentless pursuit keeps his spirits high, even in the most uncertain times: “If there isn’t a meaning to anything, and we are just here, and it’s this big cosmic joke, then why not look at everything as being beautiful and crazy?”
The Artsy Vanguard 2025
The Artsy Vanguard is our annual feature highlighting the most promising artists working today. The seventh edition of The Artsy Vanguard features 10 exceptional talents poised to become the next great leaders of contemporary art. Explore more of The Artsy Vanguard 2025 and browse works by the artists.
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