James Irvine Taylor
November 16, 2024–January 11, 2025
Opens Saturday, November 16, 3–5pm

Cushion Works is pleased to present an exhibition of visionary artwork by James Irvine Taylor. From the heart of San Francisco’s Tenderloin, Taylor manifested an explosive array of signs, symbols, and schematics on paper, mostly populated by intricate automobiles against multi-colored, geometric landscapes. Taylor mapped an architecture just out of reach, and marked many of his works with the words “Futurists Utopians,” pairing the former’s yen for speed and transportation with the latter’s intentional withdrawal in search of the ideal. A network of corporate and clandestine entities, including Ford, NASA, the CIA, and FBI, populate the margins in the artist’s idiosyncratic script. Cushion Works presents a constellation of works on paper and foam core – some double-sided – and a series of notebooks, teeming and alive.
Taylor was involved for many years with San Francisco’s Community Arts Program (CAP), who hosted his last exhibition in 2012. He has since slipped out of view. The Community Arts Program (CAP) is a free, drop-in art studio for residents of San Francisco’s Tenderloin. Each year, more than 3,500 artists benefit from materials and space to create, house, exhibit, and sell their artwork. CAP regularly hosts exhibitions at its 1009 Market Street gallery. CAP is a program of Hospitality House, a progressive, community-based organization in San Francisco providing opportunities and resources for personal growth and self-determination to houseless people and neighborhood residents.