We sat down with the artist ahead of her highly anticipated debut.

At a modest dining-table-turned-studio tucked into the corner of a brick-walled apartment in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, surrounded by half-assembled installations and hand-written poems pinned to the walls, Tay Byers moves quietly- deliberate, unhurried, deeply present. After an extended hiatus, the artist returns to the public eye (and a new medium) with The Between, an immersive solo exhibition showing November 6 in New York City.

Her resurgence has sparked genuine excitement in fine art circles- not for spectacle, but for substance. Critics have described her work as “enigmatic” and “a fresh leap in the art world,” and with The Between, Byers seems ready to reintroduce herself not as a sensation, but as a serious, experienced voice with something to say.

We sat down with Byers to talk about craft, transition, and what it means to create work that breathes between worlds.

Women’s Artist Collective: You’ve been away for a while. What brought you back?

Tay Byers: Well, honestly, I tried everything to not come back! Life had kind of pushed me in one direction, and I really tried to be okay with that, but there was always that pull there, that whisper of like, “this isn’t your path.” I truly did my best to ignore it. I tried everything else under the sun except art for years. But in the end, I just couldn’t take it. My heart couldn’t take it. I had sort of a critical moment after my brother died. I couldn’t function. I could hardly brush my hair. I didn’t want food, I didn’t want company. But I wanted to create. I feel like it saved me, in a way. To get back to the work. With an entirely new meaning, I might add. But that’s another story.

WAC: That’s intriguing. What’s the story?

TB: Well, just in what I even mean when I say the word art, and what that looks like functionally. So for context, I went to an arts college, and I was probably more open-hearted then than in any other time of my life, like the work was so pure, it was so real. But then, this terrible thing happened and it was too big for my twenty-year-old brain to process, so my body just kind of shut everything down emotionally. My focus shifted from “how can I be emotionally authentic in my art” to “how can I develop my technical skillset” simply because it was less vulnerable, and I needed that for a long time while there was all this other stuff on my plate. What I thought was going to be this temporary period of time ended up stretching out over almost a decade, and then it’s like, I’m not even really an artist anymore, right? I stopped calling myself one. I stopped thinking of myself as one. And then, the winter after Derek died, I read this book, The Creative Act, and it felt like I was nineteen years old again. I remembered what art used to feel like. What it used to mean. It used to be so real for me, not about technical skillset, but about “what does my heart have to say?” So I just said fuck it to everything except that and threw myself into it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not even my business if the art is technically “good.” I’m not claiming it’s technically good! I’m just saying it’s the truth, for me. It’s my truth. And that feels like enough now. In fact, that feels like the entire point of art at all, actually.

WAC: The title The Between is compelling. What does it represent to you?

TB: I think the representation functions on multiple levels. As a collection, the work itself, it represents the painful and beautiful juxtaposition of the human experience. Joy co-exists with fear, anticipation co-exists with dread, yearning co-exists with avoidance. For me personally, it’s a physical manifestation of psyche, of confusion, of grief. And then there’s also a level of introspection too, like what does all of this mean for the viewer? I hope the audience feels that, I hope it feels like it’s about them. Because it is. It’s the mirror between all of us.

WAC: There’s a lot of buzz around this show. How do you stay centered amid that energy?

TB: I’m not sure I would describe myself as centered! I think I’m hyper-focused, I’ll say that. For sure that’s my double-edged sword, my focus. Some days I’ll forget to even drink water for like 10 hours straight but then I’ll crash into bed feeling like superhuman because I got so much done. For me it’s just this natural zeroing in process, like as the pressure increases with the date of the exhibit approaching, the outside noise dampens more and more, and at this point I just truly don’t perceive anything except the work that’s right in front of me. It’s so important to me, to get it right. To make it true. That’s what I care about.

WAC: What do you hope visitors take away from The Between?

TB: I hope they leave feeling a release. I hope they can see the beauty in the dance, in the interplay of life. I hope they feel like, life is this immensely beautiful gift that we get to enjoy for like a second, and it’s not perfect and we’re not perfect, but maybe the point isn’t to be perfect. Through the dark and through the light and through the pain…Just breathe. Feel. Feel. That’s enough.

As we wrapped our conversation, Byers carefully positioned her pen at a precise forty-five-degree angle atop a stack of notes piled up on her dining table. “I really want to get this right,” she said softly, almost to herself. That sense of stillness, of deliberateness, runs through everything she does.

When The Between opens on November 6, it won’t be just another debut. It will be an invitation: to pause, to notice, to dwell in the moments that connect one state of being to another.

For an artist like Tay Byers, who builds worlds out of silence and transition, that might be the most radical act of all.

Exhibition Details

Title: The Between
Date & Time: Thursday, November 6 2025 | 6–8 PM
Location: 260 W 36th Street, New York, NY 10018
Tickets & Info: Eventbrite – The Between