Henry Taylor’s Bold Paintings and Other Artworks On View at The Whitney Museum of American Art
By Monika Hankova
The largest exhibition to date of Henry Taylor (born 1958), a Los Angeles-based artist, presents around 130 different artworks from all periods of the artist’s more than 30-year-long career: paintings-portraits, the assemblage sculptures, site-specific installations, painted found items, rare drawings, assemblages, and a selection of everyday objects collected by the artist.
Influenced by Kerry James Marshall, Taylor’s intimate portraits of people of his immediate family, friends, celebrities or strangers capture in a rather raw way social milieu and mood of his subjects. The artist who graduated from CalArts is no doubt a people person who approaches his subjects with a distinctive sensitivity depicting folks from all walks of life. As Zadie Smith put it in her 2018 essay for The New Yorker “Henry Taylor’s Promiscuous Painting”: “The artist’s subjects are drawn from wildly divergent walks of life – the famous and the dawn-and-out, the sane and the mad, the rich and the poor.“
In 1944, Taylor’s parents moved from East Texas to California leaving the segregated South searching for better economic conditions for themselves. Taylor – the youngest of eight children, who often referred to himself as Taylor the Eight – captures memories of his large extended family after the World War II during the Great Migration, and reflects on their experiences, as well as experiences affecting Black Americans nowadays.
Indeed, the artist often delves into political and social allegory and current events. One of the first galleries shows a powerful site-specific installation of mannequins in leather jackets and black berets, one of the latest work of the artist (2022). It is homage to The Black Panther Party, especially Taylor’s brother, who was member of this self-defense, revolutionary organisation in California. Additionally, the installation includes a display of 15 photographs of the recent victims of police brutality.
Young men murdered by the police are memorialized in several paintings. These artworks refer to the US penal system by depicting prison walls, guard towers, but also surreal compositions, such as for example in Trail (2015), which refers to George Jackson, the incarcerated political activist who helped raise awareness about the brutality and racism faced by Black prisoners. In Taylor’s painting, there is Jackson’s inmate ID number while in prison next to an image of Bob Dylan whose 1971 song George Jackson paid tribute to this activist. The exhibition curators further explain: “Taylor’s dynamic composition echoes the complexity and rhythmic, improvisational quality of jazz.”
In his famous painting See Alice Jump (2011) Taylor depicts Alice Coachman, the athlete legend who set a record in the high jump at the 1948 London games, becoming the first Black woman to win an Olympic gold medal. Her success symbolized hope and progress for Black Americans at a time when racial segregation and discrimination spread through the United States. On the painting, Coachman looks as if she is jumping over houses. As the exhibition curators emphasize: “Taylor metaphorically alludes to the social and economic barriers she overcame growing up in the segregated South.”
The ambitious paintings of famous figures, celebrities, artists and others include Martin Luther King Jr., Miles Davis, Whitney Houston, Jay Z, or Barack and Michelle Obama. Celebrities, however, seem to have the same importance for Taylor as every day “no-name” people and those living on the edge of a society. Taylor worked for more than a decade in Camarillo State Mental Hospital in California as a psychiatric technician. He was in contact mostly with adults living with mental illness or disabilities, but also with those seeking treatment for substance use disorders. These people became subjects of his drawings he started to make during his free hours. On display are rare drawings and pencil sketches Taylor made of patients with whom he had a close relationship. These sketches show Taylor as an empathetic observer possessing a great deal of emotional sensitivity.
Taylor often paints on found objects and everyday materials, such as crates, cigarette and cereal boxes, bottles, and even furniture. One of the examples of this practice is a blue suitcase which depicts Taylor’s friend the Grammy Award-winning rapper Tyler, the Creator, who has been often taken the suitcase with him on the stage. In these mundane painted objects that function as sketches, Taylor experiments with language, text and abstraction.
The show is accompanied by a catalog published by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and DelMonico Books.
Henry Taylor: B Side is on view at the Whitney Museum through January 28, 2024.