Henry Taylor | |
|---|---|
 Artist Henry Taylor working on a painting | |
| Born | 1958 Ventura, California, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | California Institute of the Arts |
| Known for | Painting |
Henry Taylor (born 1958) is an American artist and painter who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He is best known for his acrylic paintings, mixed media sculptures, and installations.
Henry Taylor was born the youngest of eight brothers and sisters, which earned him the childhood nickname "Henry VIII" [1] (which he still occasionally calls himself) [2] in Ventura, California, to a father who was employed by the U.S. government as a commercial painter and is listed as a painter on Henry's birth certificate. [3] [4] Raised in Oxnard, California, Henry took art classes at Oxnard College under James Jarvaise, who became an ongoing mentor. [4] His brother, Randy, was a founding member of the Ventura County chapter of the Black Panthers. [1] [5]
After 10 years of working as a psychiatric technician at Camarillo State Mental Hospital, Taylor retired in 1997. He attended the California Institute for the Arts, [6] where in 1995, he obtained his Bachelor's of Fine Art. [7] [8] [9]
Taylor has three children: Jade, Noah, and Epic. The youngest of which, Epic, Taylor had with artist Liz Glynn. [10]
Taylor's largest output of work is in portraiture: he is known to paint obsessively, on various materials, including empty cigarette packs, detergent boxes, cereal boxes, suitcases, crates, bottles, furniture, and stretched canvas. [6] [11] [12] [13] His subjects include family, friends, patients (when employed at the hospital), acquaintances, strangers, waitresses, celebrities, homeless people, himself, historical figures, cultural figures, sports heroes, politicians, and individuals from photographs or other art works. [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] At times, Taylor collapses time periods and spaces, as in Cicely and Miles Visit the Obamas (2017): in this work, Cicely Tyson and Miles Davis—painted after a famous photograph of the couple from 1968—are seen in front of the White House, alluding to their imaginary visit to the Obamas. [19] Taylor's painterly style has been variously described as sensuous, vibrant, bold, fast and loose, full of empathy, generosity, and love, and the visual equivalent to blues music, while retaining a profound critical social sensibility. [11] [14] [15] [20] His work has been lauded for maintaining an impossible balance between careful and sophisticated art-world references with a seemingly spontaneous and natural expressiveness. [21] Taylor's oeuvre has been aligned within various American lineages, including the portraiture tradition of Alice Neel, and the work of Harlem Renaissance painters such as Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden, and compared with his peer Kerry James Marshall. [6] [15] [22]
One of Taylor's more recent works, The Times Ain't A Changing, Fast Enough! [23] captures the events of the shooting of Philando Castile, who was shot and killed in his own car with his girlfriend and 4-year-old.
Taylor showed work that delved into the old practice of the Master's Golf Tournament using Black only caddies in a show titled: "Disappeared, but A Tiger Showed Up, Later" at Hauser & Wirth, Southampton. [24]
Taylor's important exhibitions include a mid-career retrospective at MoMA PS1, [16] along with solo exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Artpace, and the Santa Monica Museum of Art, along with group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Hammer Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Rubell Museum, and the Bruce High Quality Foundation. [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30]
In 2023, he was an Artist-in-Residence at the Fabric Workshop Museum in Philadelphia, in which he presented the solo show Henry Taylor: Nothing Change, Nothing Strange. [31] Also in 2023, Taylor collaborated with rapper and music businessman Pharrell Williams on designs for the 2024 Spring Season men's collection for luxury brand Louis Vuitton. [32]
The exhibit Henry Taylor: B Side was exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan from October 4, 2023 to January 28, 2024. From November 6, 2022 to April 30, 2023, it was at The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. Exhibition Catalogue Coinciding with the retrospective of the at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Taylor has been honored as the artist whose works were first presented at the inaugural exhibition of Hauser & Wirth's Paris gallery in Paris in October, 2024. [33]
His works are included in the permanent collections of prestigious institutions in the United States such as Pérez Art Museum Miami, [34] Carnegie Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, [35] San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, [36] the J. Paul Getty Museum, [37] the Pinault Collection, [38] Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, and Hammer Museum at University of California, Los Angeles, [31] among many others.
He was awarded the Robert De Niro, Sr. Prize for his achievements in painting. [5]
Taylor is represented by Hauser & Wirth (since 2020), Blum & Poe in Los Angeles, [39] [32] and Feuer/Mesler gallery in New York. [40]
“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.” [41]
"It takes courage to do a lot of things. But, in a way, it doesn’t actually take courage, because you are free to do it. It’s like jumping in the water. The water’s cold, but you just jump in. You’ve gotta just jump in all the fucking time." [4]
Matthew Day Jackson is an American artist whose multifaceted practice encompasses sculpture, painting, collage, photography, drawing, video, performance and installation. Since graduating with an MFA from Rutgers University in 2001, following his BFA from the University of Washington in Seattle, he has had numerous solo exhibitions. His work has been shown at MAMbo Museo d'Arte Moderna in Bologna, Italy; Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in Boulder, Colorado; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA; the Portland Museum of Art Biennial in Portland, Maine; and the Whitney Biennial Day for Night in New York.
Mark Bradford is an American visual artist. Bradford was born, lives, and works in Los Angeles and studied at the California Institute of the Arts. Recognized for his collaged painting works, which have been shown internationally, his practice also encompasses video, print, and installation. Bradford was the U.S. representative for the 2017 Venice Biennale. He was included in Time Magazine’s list of the 100 Most Influential People in 2021.
Mark Grotjahn is an American painter best known for abstract work and bold geometric paintings. Grotjahn lives and works in Los Angeles.
Jason Fayette Rhoades was an American installation artist. Better known in Europe, where he exhibited regularly for the last twelve years of his life, Rhoades was celebrated for his combination dinner party/exhibitions that feature violet neon signs and his large scale sculptural installations inspired by his rural upbringing in Northern California and Los Angeles car culture. His work often incorporates building materials and found objects assembled with "humor and conceptual rigor." He was known for by-passing conventional ideas of taste and political correctness in his pursuit of the creative drive.
Hauser & Wirth is a Swiss contemporary and modern art gallery.
Rita Ackermann is a Hungarian-born American artist recognized for her abstract paintings that incorporate human forms, primarily focusing on themes of anthropomorphism and femininity. Her works, often depicting women and allusions to fairy tales, explore the nuances of adolescent disinterest using a unique and expressive style of brushwork. She lives in New York City.
Peter Ford Young is an American painter. He is primarily known for his abstract paintings that have been widely exhibited in the United States and in Europe since the 1960s. His work is associated with Minimal Art, Post-minimalism, and Lyrical Abstraction. Young has participated in more than a hundred group exhibitions and he has had more than forty solo exhibitions in important contemporary art galleries throughout his career. He currently lives in Bisbee, Arizona.
Jack Whitten was an American painter and sculptor. In 2016, he was awarded a National Medal of Arts.
Edward "Ed" Clark was an abstract expressionist painter known for his broad, powerful brushstrokes, radiant colors and large-scale canvases. An African-American, his major contributions to modernist painting remained unrecognized until relatively late in his seven-decade career, during which he pioneered the use of shaped canvases and a commercially available push broom to create striking works of art.
Nicole Eisenman is a French-born American artist known for her oil paintings and sculptures. She has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship (1996), the Carnegie Prize (2013), and has thrice been included in the Whitney Biennial. On September 29, 2015, she won a MacArthur Fellowship award for "restoring the representation of the human form a cultural significance that had waned during the ascendancy of abstraction in the 20th century."
Mary Heilmann is an American painter based in New York City and Bridgehampton, NY. She has had solo shows and travelling exhibitions at galleries such as 303 Gallery and Hauser & Wirth (Zurich) and museums including the Wexner Center for the Arts and the New Museum. Heilmann has been cited by many younger artists, particularly women, as an influential figure.
Paul Schimmel is an American curator of contemporary art based in Los Angeles. Schimmel served as the chief curator of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), from 1990 until 2012, where he organized numerous exhibitions. From 2013 through 2017, he was a vice president and partner with the art gallery Hauser & Wirth and co-founder of Hauser Wirth & Schimmel in Los Angeles. In late February 2017, Schimmel departed from the Hauser & Wirth enterprise, including Hauser Wirth & Schimmel in Los Angeles, with no public comment on his behalf.
Charles Gaines is an American artist whose work interrogates the discourse of aesthetics, politics, and philosophy. Taking the form of drawings, photographic series and video installations, the work consistently involves the use of systems, predominantly in the form of the grid, often in combination with photography. His work is rooted in Conceptual Art – in dialogue with artists such as Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner and Mel Bochner – and Gaines is committed to its tenets of engaging cognition and language. As one of the only African-American conceptual artists working in the 1970s, a time when political expressionism was a prevailing concern among African-American artists, Gaines was an outlier in his pursuit of abstraction and non-didactic approach to race and politics. There is a strong musical thread running through much of Gaines' work, evident in his repeated use of musical scores as well in his engagement with the idea of indeterminacy, as similar to John Cage and Sol LeWitt.
Drew Heitzler is an American artist best known for his film and video work. Heitzler lives and works in Venice, California.
Françoise Grossen is a textile artist known for her braided and knotted rope sculptures. She lives and works in New York City. Grossen’s work has been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Sonia Gomes is a Brazilian contemporary artist who lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. Gomes frequently employs found objects and textiles in her sculptures, twisting, stretching, and bundling them to fashion wiry or knotty forms.
Sue Williams is an American artist born in 1954. She came to prominence in the early 1980s, with works that echoed and argued with the dominant postmodern feminist aesthetic of the time. In the years since, her focus has never waned yet her aesthetic interests have moved toward abstraction along with her subject matter and memories. She lives and works in New York.
Greg Parma Smith is a New York-based painter. He is known for his precise painterly realism, which incorporates elements of academic figuration, representational painting, neo-pop, and appropriation art.
Gina Beavers is an American artist based in the New York area. She first gained attention in the early 2010s for thickly painted, relief-like acrylic images of food, cosmetics techniques and bodybuilders appropriated from Instagram snapshots and selfies found using hashtags such as #foodporn, #sixpack and #makeuptutorial. Her later work has continued to recombine these recurrent subjects, as well as explore memes, irreverent conflations of genres or art history and kitsch, identity, fandom and celebrity-worship. In 2019, New York Times critic Martha Schwendener described her paintings as "canny statements on contemporary bodies, beauty and culture … [that] tackle the weirdness of immaterial images floating through the ether, building them up into something monumental, rather than dismissing them."
Mira Dancy is an American painter. Dancy is known for her paintings on plexiglass of nudes, often executed in bright fluorescent colors. Since her January 2015 show at Night Gallery in Los Angeles, her work has been in demand from Hong Kong and Paris to MoMA PS1's "Greater New York" show, and her name has appeared on any number of annual top-ten lists of artists to watch. Her work is held in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. In addition her work "No Man's Land" at the Rubell Family Collection (traveled) and "Unrealism" an exhibition organized by Jeffery Deitch and Larry Gagosian, Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2016); and Galerie Hussenot, Paris (2015). Her work is included in the collections of LACMA, Los Angeles; Columbus Museum of Art; and the YUZ Foundation, Shanghai.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Artists | |
| Other | |
