I knew very little about Henry Taylor and his art before going to see the exhibit at the Whitney Museum in New York City. Henry Taylor is a present-day Black artist based in Los Angeles whose work over the last 30 years consists of a free-wheeling and experimental approach to drawing, painting, and sculpture. As the enormously prolific painter explains, “I paint everyone, or I try to. I try to capture the moment I am with someone who could be my friend, a neighbor, a celebrity, or a homeless person.” 

From the moment you walk into the exhibit, you feel viscerally the deep empathy that Henry Taylor captures in his paintings, an empathy for those living under an oppressive and destructive system. That empathy, the active sharing in the emotional experience of others, is rooted in his experience working as a psychiatric technician for ten years at the Camarillo State Mental Hospital while studying art at Oxnard Community College and CalArts in California. Taylor’s rarely seen early drawings of patients at the institution show the haunting reality of their confinement but also their humanity. 

Taylor’s creations can be both joyous in the celebration of Black culture, tender in the depiction of his mother and others in his family, and profoundly gut-wrenching in the paintings of the murders by police of Philando Castile and Sean Bell, and the lynching of James Byrd Jr. The latter painting, too much hate, in too many state, shows only the tailgate of a pickup truck with a Texas license plate and a chain dangling from its bumper that “places the viewer in the vantage point of James Byrd Jr., a Black man who was abducted and murdered on June 7, 1998, in Jasper County, Texas, by three white supremacists who chained his ankles to the back of their pickup truck and dragged him to his death.” (from the exhibit text) Standing in front of the painting, I was brought to tears.

Drawing from newspaper clippings, photographs and his life experiences (Taylor’s grandfather was murdered by white men in Texas), Henry Taylor’s work can be considered an act of resistance against the oppression that Black people face every day. There’s a room-sized installation at the Whitney exhibit in tribute to the former Black Panther Party where stand mannequins clad in black leather jackets and with historic buttons of Huey Newton, the panther symbol, etc., in front of a banner reading “End War and Racism!!! Support the Black Panthers.” Black gloves formed into fists hang from the ceiling. Among the mannequins is an American flag, and you wonder what it’s doing there… until you go up closer and see J. Edgar Hoover’s eyes on the wall.^* Drawing the connection to today, on the wall to the left are large photos of those killed by police in recent years. 

Henry Taylor’s provocative, emotional, and impactful exhibit is a must-see event. If you’re in the New York City area, check it out! (The exhibit closes on January 28.) If you can’t visit the exhibit you can go to the Whitney Museum website to view his work and other information about Henry Taylor’s life and art. 

*  J. Edgar Hoover was the head of the FBI who developed the COINTELPRO program that was used to infiltrate, harass, disrupt, smear, and murder or destroy various individuals and organizations. COINTELPRO targeted the Black civil rights and liberation movements, communists, socialists, nationalist independence movements, the New Left (student radicals, the anti-war movement), and gay rights and environmental activists. See “American Crime Case #42: COINTELPRO—The FBI Targets the Black Freedom Struggle, 1956-1971” and “American Crime Case #41: COINTELPRO—The FBI Targets the New Left, 1964-1971” on revcom.us. [back]