Henry Taylor

Published with Musée Picasso.

This volume encompasses the entire four-decade career of Los Angeles–based artist Henry Taylor (born 1958). Uniting around 100 works—including paintings, sculptures and installations—the monograph evinces Taylor’s lifelong dedication to depicting the human condition in all its diversity. Taylor is best known for his depiction of Black American life, and each of his works is a holistic visual biography. Interweaving personal experiences, collective memories and reinterpretations of iconic works of art—notably those by David Hammons, Philip Guston and Pablo Picasso—Taylor’s kinetic, loose brushwork animates and preserves moments in time, both pivotal and quotidian.
In addition to high-quality reproductions, this eponymous monograph features an overarching essay on the artist’s career by curator Joanne Snrech; an interview by Cécile Debray; a critical essay on the representation of American history in the artist’s oeuvre by art historian Elvan Zabunyan; a reprint of a text by curator Laura Hoptman published in 2012 for MoMA; and a chronology by curator François Dareau.

Published with The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Surveying 30 years of Henry Taylor’s work in painting, sculpture and installation, this comprehensive monograph celebrates a Los Angeles artist widely appreciated for his unique aesthetic, social vision and freewheeling experimentation. Taylor’s portraits and allegorical tableaux—populated by friends, family members, strangers on the street, athletic stars and entertainers—display flashes of familiarity in their seemingly brash compositions, which nonetheless linger in the imagination with uncanny detail. In his paintings on cigarette packs, cereal boxes and other found supports, Taylor brings his primary medium into the realm of common culture. Similarly, the artist’s installations often recode the forms and symbolisms of found materials (bleach bottles, push brooms) to play upon art historical tropes and modernism’s appropriations of African or African American culture. Taken together, the various strands of Taylor’s practice display a deep observation of Black life in America at the turn of the century, while also inviting a humanist fellowship that pushes outward from the particular.
Raised in Oxnard, California, Henry Taylor (born 1958) took art classes at Oxnard College in the 1980s and studied under James Jarvaise, who became a mentor. From 1984 through 1995 Henry Taylor worked as a psychiatric technician at Camarillo State Mental Hospital (a facility that is now California State University Channel Islands) while concurrently attending the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Valencia, where he obtained his Bachelor of Fine Art degree in 1995. Taylor has had institutional solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1 and the Studio Museum in Harlem. He lives and works in Los Angeles.