Taylor Mead

In 1967, Taylor Mead played a part in the surrealistic play Desire Caught by the Tail by Pablo Picasso when it was set for the first time in France at a festival in Saint-Tropez, among others with Ultra Violet.

While living on Ludlow Street, Mead read his poetry regularly at The Bowery Poetry Club. His first book of poems, "Taylor Mead on Amphetamines and in Europe", was written in 1968 (Republished by the Taylor Mead Estate, September 2015) His last book of poems (published by Bowery Poetry Books) is called A Simple Country Girl. He was the subject of Jim Jarmusch's documentary Excavating Taylor Mead, which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2005. The film shows him engaging in his nightly habit of feeding stray cats in an East Village cemetery after bar-hopping, and features a cameo by Jim Jarmusch, in which Jarmusch explains that once, when Mead went to Europe, he enlisted Jarmusch's brother to feed the cemetery cats in Mead's absence.

In 1995, Mead spent eight hours a day for a week at the Bon Temps bar, New Orleans, being documented in the photobooth costumed as a series of Warholian characters for Blake Nelson Boyd's documentary Photobooth Trilogy. Characters included Superman and Mickey Mouse from Warhol's Myth series and references to Mead's performances in Lonesome Cowboys and Nude Restaurant.

Mead was displaced from Ludlow Street in April 2013, receiving a settlement to move out, after many years of a dispute with his landlord. He lived with his niece, Priscilla Mead, in Denver and was planning to return to New Orleans on May 21 to prepare for the opening of his exhibition at the Boyd Satellite Gallery on Julia Street in that city, but he died on May 8, 2013 in Denver. He was 88.