Taylor Mead, RIP

Andy Warhol and Taylor Mead

Writer, actor, and performer Taylor Mead has passed at the age of 88.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Mead appeared in Ron Rice’s beat classic The Flower Thief (1960), in which he “traipses with an elfin glee through a lost San Francisco of smoke-stuffed North Beach cafes…” Film critic P. Adams Sitney called The Flower Thief “the purest expression of the Beat sensibility in cinema.” Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman called Mead “the first underground movie star.” -[Wiki]

The artist also appeared in several Andy Warhol films, including the infamous Taylor Mead’s Ass, a film that consisted of, as Art Forum famously described it, “seventy-six seriocomic minutes of this poet/actor’s buttocks absorbing light, attention, debris.” He was also the subject of the 2005 documentary Excavating Taylor Mead.

RIP Taylor Mead. Head below for a few videos, including his appearance in Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee & Cigarettes.

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