Over the years, Taylor has depicted many artists, critics, and curators from his community including Andrea Bowers, Deana Lawson, and Robert Pruitt, all of whom have works in the Whitney's collection. However, Taylor's focus on the art world extends beyond those he knows personally. His "covers" of Dawoud Bey's photograph of David Hammons and Gerhard Richter's painting of his daughter are examples of how he invokes a broader art-historical family by reinterpreting the art of others. Taken together, these works form a map of Taylor's social and artistic circles.
Henry Taylor, Before Gerhard Richter there was Cassi, 2017
In Before Gerhard Richterthere was Cassi, Taylor borrows from Gerhard Richter’s 1988 painting of his then-eleven-year-old daughter Betty to create a portrait of the artist Cassi Namoda. In Taylor’s “cover” of Richter’s painting, he retains Betty’s pink-and- white outfit and her pose of turning away from the viewer, revealing only a sliver of her face.
This painting imagines the artist Noah Davis as an adolescent. Davis—a cofounder of Los Angeles’s Underground Museum and a multidisciplinary artist whose figurative work portrayed real and imagined scenes of Black life—was a dear friend of Taylor’s and continues to be a significant influence in his life and art. Painting Davis’s portrait two years after his death from a rare form of cancer at age thirty-two was Taylor’s way of “keeping him here and present.”
Henry Taylor, Hammons meets a hyena on holiday, 2016
This painting playfully alters a photograph by Dawoud Bey of the artist David Hammons performing his influential work Bliz-aard Ball Sale (1983). In that work, Hammons took on the role of a New York street vendor, selling a selection of snowballs meticulously organized atop a “North African rug” on the sidewalk in front of him. In 2016, the Whitney Museum commissioned Taylor to create a holiday card. Using Bey’s photograph as a springboard, Taylor pays homage to Hammons by depicting the artist standing in front of the Great Mosque of Djenné in Mali selling snowballs with a hyena looking on. In keeping with the holiday spirit of the commission, Taylor replaces the blazer hanging on the gate in Bey’s photo with a Santa Claus robe and adds a reindeer-pulled sleigh in the painting’s upper left corner.
