Taylor Mead (December 31, 1924 – May 8, 2013) was a united states author, actor and artist. Mead made an appearance in a number of of Andy Warhol’s subterranean films filmed at Warhol’s Factory, including Tarzan and Jane Obtained… Kind of (1963) and Taylor Mead’s Ass (1964).
Born in Detroit, Michigan and elevated by divorced parents mostly within the wealthy suburb of Grosse Pointe, he made an appearance in Ron Rice’s beat classic The Flower Crook (1960), by which he “traipses with elfin glee via a lost Bay Area of smoke-stuffed North Beach cafes …” Film critic P. Adams Sitney known as The Flower Crook “the purest expression from the Beat sensibility in cinema.” Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman known as Mead “the very first subterranean superstar.”
In 1967, Taylor Mead performed a component within the surrealistic play Desire Caught through the Tail by Pablo Picasso if this was set the very first time in France in a festival in Saint-Tropez, amongst others with Ultra Purple.
Within the mid-1970s, Gary Weis made some short films of Mead speaking to his cat in the kitchen area of his Ludlow Street apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side known as Taylor Mead’s Cat. One film of Mead extemporizing around the benefits of constant television watching aired throughout the second season of Saturday Night Live.
In 1995, Mead spent eight hrs each day for any week in the Bon Temps bar, New Orleans, being documented within the photobooth costumed as a number of Warholian figures for Blake Nelson Boyd’s documentary Photobooth Trilogy. Figures incorporated Superman and Donald Duck from Warhol’s Myth series and references to Mead’s performances in Lonesome Cowboys and Nude Restaurant.
While living on Ludlow Street, Mead read his poetry regularly in the Bowery Poetry Club. His First book of poems “Taylor Mead on Amphetamines as well as in Europe” was designed in 1968 (Republished through the Taylor Mead Estate, September 2015)
His last book of poems (printed by Bowery Poetry Books) is known as An Easy Country Girl. He was the topic of a documentary titled Excavating Taylor Mead, by Jim Jarmusch which debuted in the Tribeca Film Festival in 2005. The show shows him participating in his nightly practice of feeding stray cats within an East Village graveyard after bar-hopping, featuring a cameo by Jim Jarmusch, by which Jarmusch explains that when, when Mead visited Europe, he enlisted Jarmusch’s brother to give the graveyard cats in Mead’s absence.
Mead made an appearance within the final segment of Jarmusch’s 2003 film Coffee and Cigarettes. He’s been “a beloved icon from the downtown New You are able to art scene because the 60s.”
Mead was displaced from Ludlow Street in April 2013, getting a settlement to maneuver out, after a period of the dispute together with his landlord. He resided together with his niece, Priscilla Mead, in Denver and it was planning to go back to New Orleans on May 21 to organize for that opening of his exhibition in the Boyd Satellite Gallery on Julia Street for the reason that city, but he died on May 8, 2013 in Denver. He was 88.
