This episode is a special one for me, as it's with Gary Taxali a huge personal favorite artist of mine, somebody I've been following since the '90s. Gary is a Toronto-based artist, illustrator, and visual satirist whose unmistakable retro-pop style has made him one of the most celebrated illustrators working today.
He's done work with The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, GQ, TIME, Newsweek, and The New York Times and has done collaborations with brands and companyies like Converse, Sony, Warner Brothers and even the Royal Canadian Mint, where he got to design a series of commemorative coins! Taxali's career bridges fine art, editorial illustration, design, pop culture, and sharp social commentary, but does it with a visual language that feels vintage, subversive, funny, and unsettling all at once. He's managed to carve out a lane entirely his own in the worlds of contemporary art and illustration in a way that blurs the boundaries between the two.
Gary Taxali is more than a world-class illustrator however: Over the course of the last decade, he’s become one of the most biting political artists during this unnerving era of the Trump regime. As America has lurched deeper into authoritarian spectacle, MAGA extremism, and the corrosive theater of the toxic Trump years, Taxali’s work has stood out as fearless, caustic, funny, and brutally clear-eyed. In this conversation, we talk about art as protest, satire as resistance, the role of illustration as commentary on collapsing political culture, and how Gary has used his work to respond to fascism and the surreal absurdity of modern American life. If you’re into political art, pop art, editorial illustration, protest art, contemporary pop art, graphic design, and targeted anti-Trump commentary, you'll wanna jump on board.
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