Daily Inspiration: Meet Taylor Fourt

Today we’d like to introduce you to Taylor Fourt.

Alright, thank you for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us how you got started?
I want to think I was born a multitasker. By fourth grade, I was writing stories and reading them serially to my classmates, flashing illustrations at pivotal moments in the plot, contemporary with my first foray into music. Teaching myself songs from Super Mario 64 in-between bouts of trampoline theatre with my siblings and having the freedom as a child to lean into my nervous system and development as freely as the changing wind has led me to adulthood in surprising ways. Visual art accrued the most praise, and I ran with it as a people-pleasing middle child. Illustration scratched my imaginative itch perfectly. By middle school, I was applying to the Alabama School of Fine Arts in Birmingham, the next county from my hometown of Tuscaloosa. The twenty-five-piece portfolio was the largest body of work I’d ever made. I made it to the second round, crying during my interview in pure form. I got accepted.

This is the part about dog-ear: I wasn’t the best artist in the room when I got to my new school for once in my life. Three years of artistic and social challenges pushed me towards a future in art– a career. I entered ASFA with a portfolio seasoned with anime drawings and was subsequently a self-closeted cartoonist; teachers trained us in the “fine arts” and made little space for my dreams to illustrate, to animate. Family problems and peer influence created a final show the department head likened to Picasso’s Guernica. So I stuck “off-brand Guernica” in a slingshot, applied to art school, and made it to Kansas City on a decent scholarship. Looking back, I could’ve become anybody.

In college, I pushed my style in a thousand different directions. I played the multitasker. I even was accepted to study anime abroad at KCAI’s sister school in Osaka, Japan, for the first in a decade. My extremely personal victory was completing the circle for the weeaboo who drafted her manga in 6th grade and got free Japanese lessons from exchange students at the University of Alabama by 7th and 8th. For those five months in Kansai, I felt my heartwood singing. And while Japan may have cradled my inner child, it also showed me my new self, even if I wasn’t ready. It led me back to the soil. I would never try to take credit for any of my advances. At every important junction of my life, there were guides and helpers. And, when it came to gardening, the Fukumoto’s planted an Ahab-worthy whale-of-a seed in me: they invited me to pick beans.

I came back to finish my final year at KCAI and did so with an award, certificate, and honors. But there was no job waiting with open arms at the end of fifteen years of schooling. There wasn’t shit. Portfolios and resumes buffed to perfection weren’t landing me substantial work in the arts, just part-time gigs here and there. So, with this great expanse of time given back to me post-graduation, I joined a community garden, and I found a reason to get excited about art again. I was fully immersed in gardening when I could fully be immersed in art when I couldn’t garden. Getting to know the soil, plants, and patterns in a growing season lent itself naturally to painting and storytelling. The cycles of obsession and rest, coinciding with the elements, felt like it was honoring something bigger than me; I suppose this is more or less where I am in the present.

I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey has been a smooth road?
Looking back, I think the drastic social differences between my arts high school and my art college forced a difficult but necessary self-evaluation. My high school was very tight-knit, with only 64 in my graduating class, and given that we were one of the few art schools in the south period, it always felt like we had to stick together at the end of the day. Sure, it wasn’t without its drama, but nobody but the theatre kids were allowed to be ego-driven. In college, it seemed like it was ego or nothing, and I, for a while, got wrapped into that. Unlike high school, where I didn’t look down on other people’s art or craft because I cared about them, in college, I had genuine disgust for people who didn’t work hard or didn’t make art to a certain caliber. I didn’t realize at the time that I was also robbing them of their humanity– Finding my genuine voice after being surrounded by, and a part of, a lot of bullshit was excruciating. Untangling the web of ego is still sometimes a struggle. Underneath it all, I think my biggest challenge has always been myself. My biggest critic is always me, and that antagonism often leads me to understand myself less because I’m too busy judging my path or past. Thankfully, therapy, lifestyle choices, and conscious friendships have helped me know myself much better.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
My gouache works are recognized for their charm, whimsy, and spirit; they may illustrate complex regenerative agriculture systems or rejoice in the ancient artistic meditation of colors, form, and composition. I am known for my use of color, appreciation for simple forms, and detail. I have devoted the better six years to sharing my skills with Manheim Gardens, a collaborative urban community garden located in midtown KC (4229 Forest). I currently steward the land and students at Operation Breakthrough, an education center for youth experiencing poverty. My gardening style is still in development, but I am currently most proud of my eight watermelons growing at work. They’re everything to me right now. In all places in life, I aim to cultivate positive feedback loops. Like many people aligning their lifestyles to suit their politics better, I have difficulty participating in systems I disagree with. Thus, I am always looking for new ways to honor a future for all working-class people where knowledge and arts aren’t sanctioned.

If we knew you were growing up, how would we have described you?
Last Christmas, I watched some old home movies from my childhood. Clear amongst the jump cuts from birthdays to candid backyard play. I began to notice something; I didn’t walk. I bounded like a deer. Sunshine shone for me where the sun doesn’t shine for others (if you know what I’m saying), and I suppose I still have a tenacious optimism that my loved ones rely on. Though 28 years temper a naturally sunny personality, I will always believe what my mother taught me: to give people the benefit of the doubt, to assume humans are generally kind.

Contact Info:

• Website: taylorfourt.com
• Instagram: @t.fourt

Image Credits
Diana Guadalupe Gonzalez for the mural photo of me.