Chris Taylor was born in Tehran, Iran and lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Madrid Spain; Manila, Philippines; Muscat, Oman; Mexico City, Mexico; Brussels, Belgium; Abidjan, Ivory Coast and Tegucigalpa, Honduras all before he was 20. His work is a product of these experiences. It is best characterized as exercise in social practice in an attempt to find a critical way of working that engages wider audiences and situations beyond just art institutions, as a method for the dissemination of ideas and as a political statement.

Taylor’s experiences include learning to blow glass upside-down in order to reproduce a 16th-century Venetian goblet – a technique that was lost for over 500 years – and then planting it in a cabinet next to the original in the collections room of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He exploits the friction generated within a material and process that is a product of convention, tradition and history.

Taylor has earned numerous awards, fellowships and grants from the National Endowment of the Arts, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, The Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, The New York Foundation on the Arts and RISD. He has been an artist in residence at the Glasmuseum in Ebeltoft, Denmark; The Tacoma Museum of Glass in Tacoma, WA; Kitengela Glass in Nairobi, Kenya; Shandong University of Arts and Design in Jinan City, China; Nagoya University of Art in Nagoya, Japan; and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA. He has exhibited his work at prominent non-profit galleries including ArtSpace in New Haven, CT; Artists Space, New York, NY; Exit Art, New York, NY; and Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT.

Artist and his work