Echoes in Matter
January - February 2025
Center for Emerging Visual Artists
Visiting Curator, Taylor Bythewood-Porter
Echoes in Matter delves into the intricate relationship between memory and material, exploring how objects, textures, and substances become vessels of collective and personal histories. Featuring works by artists Molly Burt-Westvig, Alethea Canlas, Shefon N. Taylor, and Chad Cortez Everett whose reflections on time, identity, and heritage are expressed through material. Echoes in Matter invites viewers to reconsider the physical world as a repository of memory. Through sculptures, textiles, multimedia installations, and photography, the exhibition highlights how materials evoke the intangible, the persistence of cultural memory, and the deeply personal stories etched into the objects we hold dear. The featured works challenge traditional notions of permanence and decay, asking how we remember and what we choose to preserve in a rapidly changing world. Together, these works remind us that memory is not static; it is alive, mutable, and embedded in the physical fabric of our lives
The Visiting Curator Program allows artists from our region to connect with a curator who is not yet familiar with our artist community. CFEVA is proud to create more exposure for the artists we serve and provide beneficial new leads for noteworthy curators.
Taylor Bythewood-Porter, Independent Curator
Taylor Bythewood-Porter is an independent curator and writer. In 2023, she received the American Association for State and Local History Award of Excellence for her exhibition Rights and Rituals: The Making of African American Debutante Culture (2021) at the California African American Museum (CAAM). Prior to doing independent projects, Bythewood-Porter was an Assistant Curator at CAAM. During her tenure, she has co-curated several exhibitions including Tatyana Fazlalizadeh: Speaking to Falling Seeds (2023), Cross Colours: Black Fashion in the 20th Century (2020), Making Mammy: A Caricature of Black Womanhood, 1840–1940 (2019), The Liberator: Chronicling Black Los Angeles, 1900–1914 (2019), California Bound: Slavery on the New Frontier, 1848–1865 (2018), and Los Angeles Freedom Rally, 1963 (2018), and also contributed to How Sweet the Sound: The History of Gospel Music in Los Angeles (2018), Circles and Circuits 1: History and Art of the Chinese Caribbean Diaspora (2017), and Lezley Saar: Salon des Refúse (2017). She holds a Master of Arts in art business with a concentration in contemporary art from Sotheby's Institute of Art at Claremont Graduate University and a Bachelor of Arts in Communications with a focus on public relations and journalism and a minor in art history from Monmouth University.