Installation view of Henry Taylor: B Side (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, October 4, 2023-January 28, 2024). From left to right: Untitled, 2022; Huey Newton, 2007. Photograph by Ron Amstutz
Untitled
Taylor created this installation in homage to the Black Panther Party and, in particular, to his brother Randy, who was active in the Party’s branch in Ventura, California. The Black Panthers advocated for self-defense and community empowerment,
and established social programs—including free food, clothing distribution, and health clinics—to uplift marginalized communities. By including photographs of individuals recently killed by the police alongside mannequins clothed in both the black berets and leather jackets the Panthers typically wore and more contemporary attire, such as Colin Kaepernick’s
San Francisco 49ers jersey, Taylor connects protests against racial injustice from the past and present.
Taylor based this painting on a 1967 photograph of Black Panther Party cofounder Huey Newton wearing his characteristic black beret and holding a rifle and a spear, symbols of Newton’s call for armed self-defense against racial inequality and oppression. In this portrait, Taylor links Newton’s activism to the ongoing fight for racial justice through collaged fragments of news reports of the 2006 police murder of Sean Bell, whose portrait Homage to a Brother (2007) is also on view.
Homage to a Brother memorializes Sean Bell, a twenty-three-year-old Black man who was killed by plainclothes NYPD officers in Queens, New York, on the eve of
his wedding in November 2006. Upon reading of Bell’s death, Taylor was struck by how familiar he seemed,
like a son or nephew. During a 2007 residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, he visited Bell’s neighborhood, where he gathered tokens of communal love and grief for the deceased—including a gold chain and cardboard letters spelling his name—which he then incorporated into this painting. Taylor’s handwritten text includes the words “Sean, I ain’t lying, I’m thinking about you. . . . Really I want to say I didn’t know you but I love you.”
