American artist Prentiss Taylor was BOTD in 1907. Born in Washington, D.C., he studied at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and at the Art Students League in New York City. He became heavily involved in the Harlem Renaissance, befriending cultural luminaries including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Carl Van Vechten. Taylor and Hughes created the Golden Stair Press in 1931, publishing Hughes’ texts with illustrations by Taylor, most notably Scottsboro Limited, a polemic about the false rape convictions of the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama. He also produced watercolours and drawings, and had his first one-person show in New York City in 1934. Taylor was a pioneer of art therapy, working in hospitals in Washington and Maryland throughout the 1940s, and publishing the article Art as Psychotherapy in the 1950 American Journal of Psychiatry. Discreetly gay, he had a brief relationship with composer Aaron Copland in the 1920s, remaining life-long friends and correspondents. He is also thought to have had a relationship with Jimmy Daniels, an African-American singer and cabaret performer. Taylor travelled extensively throughout the 1960s, particularly in Mexico, which informed much of his later work. He died in 1991, aged 83. His work is included in the permanent collections of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American Art.