Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, Taylor Ramsey is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and educator whose large-scale watercolor paintings explore cultural preservation within the Black American storytelling tradition. Classically trained as both a painter and a 2D animator, Ramsey builds narrative worlds against the architectural backdrops that hold outsized significance in that tradition, from bus stops to front porches to the bayou. Her counter-narratives relocate the Western canon’s fairytales and classical figures into Black geographies, weaving vibrant color, pattern, and flatness into a distinct visual lexicon. Ramsey paints in watercolor at the monumental scale and seriousness of Renaissance epics. Her work draws on extensive research spanning art history, pop culture, mythology, and the cultural zeitgeist. She often incorporates text as a literary device, as her work is meant to be read as much as it is seen.  

Ramsey holds an MFA from the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art and a BFA from Sam Houston State University. Her solo exhibition While You Were Waiting was presented at Lazarus Gallery in Baltimore in 2026. She has exhibited at The Peale Museum, Baltimore, MD; the African American Museum of Dallas, Dallas, TX; Yale University’s Afro-American Cultural Center, New Haven, CT; and Cain Gallery, Corpus Christi, TX, among others. She is a recipient of the LeRoy E. Hoffberger Graduate Merit Fellowship and the 2024 Mary Castelnovo Award for Painting, and was a 2023 Carroll Harris Simms National Black Art Finalist. Her work has appeared in the Penn Journal of Arts and Sciences, and in 2026 she hosted a conversation between art historian and critic Claire Bishop and MICA’s graduate painters. She lives and works between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, MD.