Taylor Made Culture produces multidisciplinary projects that enrich, challenge, and inspire new ways to think about culture and identity. It is owned and operated by author, photographer, and cultural documentarian, Candacy Taylor.
Overground Railroad examines black mobility and culture through the lens of the Green Book. The project consists of a book (published by Abrams, 2020), a traveling exhibition by the Smithsonian Institution (SITES 2020-2023), a children’s book (Abrams), and a forthcoming mobile app.
Overground Railroad was chosen as the New York Times’ most notable books of the year and made the Schomburg Center’s Black Liberation Reading List, Oprah Magazine's top 26 travel books, and National Geographic’s top 10 list of books by women.
This project has been awarded fellowships from the Hutchins Center at Harvard University (under the direction of Henry Louis Gates Jr.), the Library of Congress, the National Trust, National Geographic, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the National Park Service, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Graham Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the California Humanities.
BOOK REVIEWS
If “making a way out of no way” is a theme that runs throughout African American life, few things encapsulate that theme more powerfully than The Green Book. A symbol of Jim Crow America, it is also a stunning rebuke of it, born out of ingenuity and the relentless quest for freedom. Candacy Taylor’s own quest for Green Book sites throughout the U.S. reveals her own relentlessness as well as a potent gift for bringing these sites, and the black past, alive. -
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University
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Overground Railroad is an extraordinary reckoning with the America that whites have always believed existed, and at the America that blacks actually experienced, navigated, and made theirs despite every barrier. The rich history and the personal narratives rescued on these pages, as well as the vivid photographs of people, places, and memorabilia rendered so beautifully throughout, are a true gift from author Candacy Taylor.
Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy.
PREVIOUS PROJECTS
American Roots examines beauty shop culture and looks at how hair intersects with race and identity in the United States. The project received an Archie Green Fellowship from the Library of Congress.
By the Horns captures the struggle and triumphs of a fearless subculture of female bullfighters in America.
Counter Culture is a critically acclaimed book and exhibition featuring waitresses aged 50 and older who have been working in American diners for most of their lives.