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Her most recent work incorporates family heirlooms to evoke connections and memories. She also uses fine fabrics, rich materials and the kind of layered directional lighting we see in Renaissance paintings, which generally depicted people of color. By elevating her subjects, she combats the erasure and omission of Black bodies. Rome-Taylor first takes carefully posed photos of her subjects before she manipulates the results digitally, making her images look more like paintings. Sometimes she also uses her images as digital negatives to create cyanotypes, as in the skirt of “Conjure Woman.” The clothing her figures wear features beading, embroidery, gold leaf and wax, inspired by decorative materials used in traditional West African culture. As Rome-Taylor’s works reassert a Black presence in the history of the American portrait tradition, they make us look anew at the other works in this gallery, includ- ing “Portrait of a Lady in a Blue Dress” (1763) by John Singleton Copley, on loan from the Terra Foundation for American Art until 2026. This loan came with four other paintings and grant funding to center marginalized and underrepresented perspectives in American art by pairing these paintings with works from our collection. The blue dress in Rome-Taylor’s “An so I stepped forward and discovered” and the blue dress in Copley’s portrait speak to each other, making us contemplate who is often pic- tured in most portraits and who is not.
Installation photographs by Jason Thrasher of works by Tokie Rome-Taylor in the museum’s H. Randolph Holder Gallery.
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