Taylor Bythewood-Porter
My curatorial lens traces ritual, memory, and the intimacy of everyday life. I gravitate toward works that whisper rather than shout, that tend to absence, and honor what the city forgets. Anchored in care and refusal, my selections reclaim overlooked spaces as portals: places where the unseen gathers, where lineage and imagination stretch across thresholds, and where new forms of presence take root.
Collaborating with other creatives on projects like uncommissioned is truly special to me as it connects to the legacy of artists like Adrian Piper, Pope. L, or David Hammons, disrupters who brought art and activism into public spaces. Their interventions confronted traditional institutions and showed that art could be both a creative act and a political one. This iteration of the project continues that spirit by highlighting artists who challenge boundaries and open up a space for dialogue, reflection, and imagination in sites we don’t usually expect to find art.
About the Curator
Taylor Bythewood-Porter is a curator and writer whose practice engages history, material culture, and Black feminist thought to examine the rituals, aesthetics, and afterlives of the African Diaspora. Her work bridges archival research and curatorial praxis to surface overlooked narratives and cultural memory.
She is the Director of Exhibitions at the Armory Center for the Arts. Previously, as Curator of History at the Museum of Riverside, she organized First Comes Love: Courtship in the Victorian Era (2025). From 2017–2023, she served as Assistant Curator at the California African American Museum (CAAM), where she was honored with the American Association for State and Local History’s Award of Excellence for Rights and Rituals: The Making of African American Debutante Culture (2021).
At CAAM, Bythewood-Porter co-curated a range of exhibitions, including Tatyana Fazlalizadeh: Speaking to Falling Seeds (2023), Cross Colours: Black Fashion in the 20th Century (2020), The Liberator: Chronicling Black Los Angeles, 1900–1914 (2019), Making Mammy: A Caricature of Black Womanhood, 1840–1940 (2019), Los Angeles Freedom Rally, 1963 (2018), and California Bound: Slavery on the New Frontier, 1848–1865 (2018). She also contributed to How Sweet the Sound: The History of Gospel Music in Los Angeles (2018), Circles and Circuits I: History and Art of the Chinese Caribbean Diaspora (2017), and Lezley Saar: Salon des Refusés (2017).
Her writing has appeared in Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, Frieze Week, and Yesterday We Said Tomorrow for Prospect.5.
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This edition of uncommissioned explores how invisibility, whether structural, ancestral, or poetic, can be reclaimed, embodied, or made palpable. Across these works, artists treat public space as a testing ground for grief, satire, memory, and joy. What emerges is not just a counter-monument, but a tender call to notice what has always been there.