Body of prayer: an interview with Steed Taylor.

Through media ranging from traditional to unorthodox, Steed Taylor forges a connection between the human experiences of longing and loss--of spirituality and memorial. In his artist statement for a series of digital prints called "Missing" (2006), Taylor writes, "As a person living with AIDS, I am constantly reminded of the tenuousness of life. This body of work is an investigation into my mortality." Black ink marks obscure Taylor's childhood image from enlargements of the most warm and intimate family photographs. In each 1960s-era suburban/rural landscape, his family poses for the first day of school, plays games, and goes fishing while the rough empty outline of one missing member wrenches the viewer back to the loss.

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Taylor's projects, so intimate in theme, simultaneously assume a public presence in the scope of audience and often in the community-oriented process of their creation. His Road Tattoos are expansive painted designs on streets or highways that commemorate the struggles of individuals and communities. Taylor's contribution to the arts had been recognized with a 2007 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, specifically as a Lily Auchincloss Fellow for enhancing the quality of life in New York City. His work has been shown in national and international galleries and museums.

JOANNA HEATWOLE: How did you first get into visual art?

STEED TAYLOR: I always had a real love of making things. I would go out and dig into the red clay of the Carolinas where I grew up, making it into little sculptures and things, and I think that just continued.

JH: Your work bridges so many different media--road surface, latex paint, intaglio and digital prints, blood, and prayers. People don't always know what to do with an artist who can't be classified by a particular method.

ST: I feel sometimes the reason I do work in different mediums is certain ideas work better in different forms. In the case of the Road Tattoos, that means using the high gloss latex on the roads. I've been kicking around some other alternative ideas of how to do it, to create permanent pieces, but I think it's important to have the idea or the art itself dictate the medium. The reverse of this is a lot of my artist friends are very focused on a specific medium and a specific style of work and there's something super satisfying about this for them.

JH: Maybe trying to classify people's work by media makes it easier to distance yourself from the content. A lot of your work creates a level of connection that makes it hard to sterilize with art language. When I first saw your series "Missing," I may have tried to analyze it, if I hadn't been crying so hard.

ST: I would say that kind of connection is a goal for my work. I really like when there is that kind of connection--something like an emotional, visceral response to the work. That's pretty hard to achieve I think, especially today when there is such a barrage of images and graphic content. Even in fine art there's such a crossover of fashion and fine art--of pornography and fine art. It's such a gray area that it's sometimes kind of hard not to be ironic and to try to be straightforward.

JH: How did you decide to be open about your HIV status as an artist?

ST: I became HIV positive when I was 23 or 24, so it was early on in the awareness of HIV and AIDS. At that time people didn't quite know how you got it and were still concerned about things like sneezing or touching people who had AIDS. There was a lot of pressure to keep an HIV diagnosis secret. So I was concerned about putting that experience into my artwork.

Then at a certain point I came to an impasse and realized that I needed to include that experience in my art. So much of my life at that point was centered around death and dying and a sense of longing and loss. I knew I had to embrace it more fully and that was how I came up with the "Missing" series. Also, it was my way of becoming public about being an HIV-positive artist living with AIDS.

JH: When I first found your work, I was researching images to show my students part of the history of art and design addressing AIDS in the United States. I had trouble finding much work made after the early 1990s. You wrote a very interesting essay online, reflecting on what you referred to as the "unfashionability" of AIDS as a theme in art today. (1)

ST: One way to look at it is AIDS may not be the fashionable theme in art right now but artists really grabbed the bull by the horns back when it was necessary. At the beginning of awareness of the disease--when people were literally dying all around you--the artists who still had the strength put that experience into their artwork. They displayed the power of art and how effective it can be. The collective Gran Fury were artists who decided to present their work in bus posters and billboards--fine art context and fine art ideas put into public forum.

You have to remember the context of that era--when Reagan wouldn't even say the word AIDS. When Princess Diana dared to hold a baby who had AIDS, it was a huge media event, and how much that simple gesture did to show that you could touch people with AIDS. At that time, Gran Fury and other groups were aggressively presenting what AIDS was about in an emotional context--a very real context in fine art. And it was fine art that got the right type of people aware of it and thinking about the epidemic.

One thing to emphasize is that AIDS in the U.S. isn't the same as it was--not that it isn't bad, not that it's no longer a serious problem. One of the miracles with this is there are effective drugs now and people tend to much live longer. Now, it is experience as a chronic illness verses a terminal illness. It's no longer popular for big corporations to fund AIDS organizations and AIDS in art organizations, or for arts organization to organize exhibitions about AIDS. In other places in the globe, of course, AIDS is still a red-hot issue.

One positive way to look at this is AIDS opened a space for other social topics in art. Whether artists are taking up this opportunity is questionable.

JH: That's a very fair and balanced view. I guess I had taken it as silence--or prematurely abandoning the issue.

ST: I've been asked whether I think AIDS is the biggest art issue of our time. I think an even stronger force in the art world that has come about recently is the voice of women artists. The majority of art students today are women. Although women still don't have as much play in museum collections as they should, now they are a major force in the art world. You suddenly have this whole other way of thinking and presenting work and ideas being put into the art world. That's another way of looking at the AIDS and art connection, it has transformed how we see art, interpret art, and discuss it.

JH: Where did the idea for the Road Tattoos come from?

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ST: I made the first "Road Tattoo" when I was at Skowhegan, an intensive nine-week summer residency program in a little town in Maine. That program was a great thing for me. It validated my sense of my artwork. Unfortunately, there was also a lot of competition and tension among the people there and I was feeling isolated. Somehow that experience made me think about marking the roads to where I was, and working with the idea of roads functioning as the skin of a community. I decided to mark the road like how people mark their skin--to use the street as a kind of canvas to commemorate or communicate something personal. I felt the best way to get the idea across would be to use design patterns already appropriated by tattoo culture. Because a road is a very long and narrow canvas, the best tattoo design patterns to use are primarily neo-primitive black work, usually called tribal designs, and Celtic knotwork.

While I was working on the first Road Tattoo there in Skowhegan, people would stop and ask what I was doing. They would even bring me sodas and snacks. What I didn't realize is there were people passing by that didn't like it and called the police. When the cops showed up they said they had received a call that there was a "Nazi skinhead painting swastikas on East Madison Road." I explained what I was doing and they said, "Oh you must be one of the people at Skowhegan." They let me finish it but nixed others I had planned.

My next project was a memorial for a woman named Evelyn who had died of breast cancer. Evelyn's friends adopted her children so I did a Celtic knot piece that was in front of their home, and all of Evelyn's friends were there to remember her. We put the names of everyone in the blended new family in the piece and then painted over them, sealing the names in the design. We talked a little bit about Evelyn and then there was a period of silence. In more recent projects, the moment of silence has evolved into a prayer.

I had the feeling that I had hit on something that worked because it was a really touching thing to do for these people, to honor this friend of theirs in this way. And then, in turn, people that just passed by also really responded to it. So, although this piece wasn't my first, I would say it was the first road tattoo where I thought through the whole idea.

JH: How do you think of your work as related to performance art?