Henry Taylor: B Side
Oct 4, 2023–Jan 28, 2024
The dress, ain't me
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Taylor is the youngest of eight children in a large extended family whose members—from his mother, father, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins to his own three children—appear frequently in his work. Taylor's parents moved from the East Texas cotton town of Naples to Oxnard, California, in 1944, making them among the millions of Black Americans who left the segregated South in search of greater economic opportunities and social freedoms during the post-World War II phase of the Great Migration. Their experiences, and the stories he heard from them growing up, instilled in Taylor a sensitivity to the cultural and political currents affecting Black Americans. As with his other works, Taylor paints his family from memory, in-person sittings, and snapshots.
Henry Taylor, Untitled, 2021
Henry Taylor, Untitled, 2021. Acrylic on linen, 71 7/8 x 54 1/8 x 1 1/4 in. (182.6 × 137.5 × 3.2 cm). Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. © Henry Taylor. Photograph by Jeff McLane
Taylor often remakes or “covers” the work of other artists just as a musician would adapt or remix a previously recorded song. He based this self-portrait on an unattributed late-sixteenth-century painting of the English king Henry V that he saw at London’s National Portrait Gallery. Substituting a regal image of himself for that of the English monarch plays on his nickname “Henry the VIII,” which he adopted in his youth as the youngest of eight children, while also challenging the stereotypes of European history painting that have typically excluded or demeaned Black people.