Discipline: Interdisciplinary Art – performance

taisha paggett

Discipline: Interdisciplinary Art – performance
Region: Riverside, CA
MacDowell Fellowships: 2024

taisha paggett is the continuation of Cheryl Yvone McGhee and Arveal Paggett Jr and a resident of the stolen gathering place of the Cahuilla, Tongva, Luiseño, and Serrano, now colonially known as Riverside, CA.

paggett’s creative research looks at dance, choreography, and its methodologies as something to be broken open, utilized, breathed into, and as a lens and lung through which to engage ideas, specifically when contemplating the terrain of racial trauma, grief, collectivity, perception, and the manufacture of fixed identities and positionalities. She is the 2019 recipient of the Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

While at MacDowell, paggett worked on her artist book project, co-authored with Jaime Shearn Coan and Tara Aisha Wills, scheduled to be published via Soberscove Press in the next year. She also worked on the installation and performance aspects of soliloquy for a horizon, to premiere at Remai Modern in Saskatoon.

Portrait by meital yaniv

Studios

Firth

taisha paggett worked in the Firth studio.

Originally a working barn perched atop the namesake hill of Hillcrest Farm, this building was converted to serve the arts in 1956. A grand set of windows was installed to make the large interior suitable for visual artists, bringing in abundant natural light from the north. The addition of a screened porch and accessible entrance ramp…

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