The latest edition of Art Journal (Volume 84, 2025) includes Taylor's article titled "Body Count: The Critical Matrices of James Rosenquist’s Growth Plan."
This article mounts an extended close reading and reinterpretation of "Growth Plan," a 1967 painting by the pop artist James Rosenquist. Where existing accounts of the painting have suggested that the work shows children doing calisthenic exercises, Taylor's research identifies the previously unknown source of its imagery: a photograph of children’s bodies classified according to a scientific growth schema. Through this image, he explores how Rosenquist used its subject to engage with the terms of 1960s abstract painting and grapple with the fraught body politics of the era.
Read the article online (login may be required): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00043249.2025.2541551
Read Alex Taylor's faculty profile: https://www.haa.pitt.edu/people/alex-j-taylor