Josephine Taylor creates narrative images on paper—drawing, print, collage—and video. Her work often examines the emotional and psychological remnants of memory, human connection and adolescence. Her subject matter is personal, rendered with a tender fragility and often at the scale of the people she is portraying.
Taylor earned a Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies with an emphasis in East Indian languages from the University of Colorado – Boulder before pursuing a graduate degree in Fine Art at the San Francisco Art Institute. She was a recipient of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art SECA Award in 2004, and was included in the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art that same year. Also, in 2004, she was awarded an Artist in Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts. In 2017, Taylor was awarded an Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation.
Taylor’s work is included in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her work was featured in OFF-SPRING: New Generations, a group exhibition at 21c Museum Hotels that premiered at the Cincinnati campus in 2013, which traveled to the museum’s Oklahoma City campus in 2018. Also, in 2018, Taylor’s work was featured in Care and Feeding: The Art of Parenthood at the Palo Alto Art Center. Her 2018 solo exhibition at Catharine Clark Gallery, Beside Me, included a video collaboration, with interdisciplinary artist, Jon Bernson. In 2023 Catharine Clark Gallery presented Taylor’s solo exhibition titled Night House.
In Spring 2019, Taylor debuted a new series of photogravures published by Mullowney Printing at Gallery 16 in the group exhibition, Epoch. In 2020 her work was featured in a group exhibition at Catharine Clark Gallery that presented projects created in collaboration with Mullowney Printing. In Summer 2023, Taylor was a part of the group exhibition Figure Telling: Contemporary Bay Area Figuration at di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art. Her work has been recently acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum and by the San Jose Museum of Art, where she was in a collection show South East North West in 2020.
