Henry Taylor: B Side,
at the Whitney Museum, New York,
October 4, 2023–January 28, 2024.
In 1946, intoxicated during his stay at a Los Angeles hotel, the saxophonist and jazz revolutionary Charlie Parker set fire to his bedsheets and ran naked through the lobby. As a result, he spent six months in Camarillo State Mental Hospital, in Ventura, California. That stay, in turn, inspired his three-minute 1947 recording “Relaxin’ at Camarillo,” the jauntiness of whose instrumental solos, including Parker’s, suggests nothing of the darkness of the backstory.
Born in Ventura twelve years after Parker’s hospital stay, the painter Henry Taylor also spent time in Camarillo—as a psychiatric technician, a job he held for a decade beginning in the late 1980s. Taylor, whose family included seven older siblings (hence his nickname, Henry VIII), earned a bachelor’s degree from the California Institute for the Arts in 1995; his work has since appeared in museums nationwide and drawn comparisons to that of Jacob Lawrence, Alice Neel, Romare Bearden, and Kerry James Marshall. Like Parker, Taylor has drawn on his experience at Camarillo, as well as many other experiences, for his art. The text introducing Henry Taylor: B Side, the artist’s exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, notes that his paintings are “executed quickly and instinctually from memory, newspaper clippings, snapshots, and in-person sittings” and makes mention of his “improvisational approach to artmaking”—the latter quality suggesting a kinship with jazz musicians such as the Parker of “Relaxin’ at Camarillo.” Unlike Park-er’s composition, though, the scenarios Taylor presents are not less dark than those that inspired them. Taylor’s work suggests a world tonally and emotionally similar to his—and ours—but remade in ways that are by turns subtle and ominous.
The human figures in B Side, nearly all of them Black, include the famous, such as Martin Luther King Jr., Jackie Robinson, Jay-Z, Eldridge Cleaver, and the track-and-field athlete Alice Coachman; ordinary people captured in everyday moments, sometimes with threatening elements—such as police cars—in the background; and members of Taylor’s own family. The paintings contain social commentary, most explicitly in the 2017 work The Times Thay Aint a Changing, Fast Enough!, which depicts the previous year’s police shooting of Philando Castile in his car, a tragedy captured on video by Castile’s girlfriend. Taylor’s visual style, meanwhile, implies a reaction to such events that is suppressed—barely —but nonetheless comes through in unsettling ways. The colors manage to be both strong and muted, signaling smoldering anger rather than flat-out rage: the yellows are mustard, not lemon, the reds closer to rust than roses. At the same time, there is an eruption of stray, unaccountable bits of color and distortions of other kinds, such as missing feet or facial features and faces with different-sized eyes. Collectively, the paintings underscore the notion that for every action—oppression, suppression—there is an equal and opposite reaction. Keep doing what you’re doing, they seem to say, and see what happens. In addition to paintings, B Side features early drawings, installations, and paintings on packages of cigarettes and food items. These last items demonstrate that Taylor’s work not only comes from many sources but ends up on many surfaces, with the artist as a kind of funnel, like a hose spraying wildly, a process that might come with a warning: contents under pressure.
The 2016 painting Gettin It Done, for example, presents a seemingly innocuous domestic scene with plenty roiling just under the surface. On the right is a bearded man with his hair in braids, wearing a white tank top, seated, and seen from the shoulders up. Behind him, to the left, a woman with stout arms, also wearing white and holding a white hair dryer, is standing and working on the man’s hair. The background is divided into two planes. Behind the woman is a mustard-yellow wall. Behind the man is a screen door with black metal bars resembling prison bars, which—from our angle—meet the top of the man’s head; a design spanning the width of three bars resembles a heart. The woman’s eyes are lowered and indistinct, making her look both intent on her work and as if she is mid-blink in a photo. But it is the man’s eyes that rivet our attention. His head lowered a bit and slightly tilted, he is looking up and to our right at something that may or may not be in the room. He looks bored—or as if he has been so unspeakably angry for so long that the anger has come to resemble calm. We see mostly the whites of his eyes, white like coals from which the fire seems to have disappeared because it has been absorbed. On the man’s shoulder, where his very dark skin meets the white strap of his tank top, is a horizontal dash of blue. We wonder why it is there. We are almost afraid to ask.
The two young men foregrounded in Untitled, from 2006, appear to be on a balcony. The man on the right is smiling at something or someone just to our right, and he is shirtless, his bare arm—hand holding a cigarette—around the shoulders of his friend. The friend is wearing an olive-green top, his blue knit cap pulled down to meet his large, frightened eyes; perhaps he is aware of something his friend is not. Indeed, there are foreboding elements in the street scene behind and below them. To the right, partly hidden by a building, is a police car. On the left is an airplane flying so low that its collision with one of the squat neighborhood buildings seems imminent. Just another day of impending disaster. Not far from the cop car is an object that, on closer inspection, looks to be a man sleeping on the sidewalk. If we inspect more closely still, there are those odd dabs of color again.
Two paintings of children, both from 2015, hang side by side. In the painting on the left is a boy in a white shirt standing on a stretch of grass whose horizon is at his ears, blue sky behind him. His red-orange shorts are the same color as the pants of the girl in the painting on the right, who is standing on a porch; the lines of mortar framing the bricks behind her are slightly wavy, as in a hallucination, and she is smiling, her mood matching the kitten-and-hearts design on her T-shirt. Each child is holding a rifle. The boy’s, in the painting titled I’m Not Dangerous, is nearly as long as he is. The girl in Girl with Toy Rifle is holding the weapon so that it points up, toward her head. The white of one of the boy’s eyes is actually brown. A small patch of green, matching the grass, stains his white shirt, as if his environment has marked him.
I’m Yours, from the same year, is an example of real life coming out just a little differently on Taylor’s canvases. The painting is based on a photograph of Taylor and his son, but here his daughter has been added behind the son, who is behind Taylor. The artist’s face, on the right, looms largest; his mouth is closed, his expression serious (as are his children’s), and here and there on Taylor’s face are those mysterious dabs of color, now resembling an image breaking up on a faulty DVD. Is something going to break this family up? Maybe not this family—but plenty of others like it.
On the wall of one of Taylor’s installations, a 2022 piece again called Untitled, is a banner reading “End War and Racism!!! Support the Black Panthers” and featuring the Black Panther Party’s eponymous logo. In front of the banner are two dozen or more mannequins, all wearing the group’s trademark black leather jackets and buttons showing the logo. Some of the mannequins have legs; others are just torsos, supported by stands. All are headless, and none have hands—but, wait, there are hands, or rather fists, black ones, hidden only if one isn’t looking, hanging from the ceiling and suspended above the anonymous bodies, about whom we see only that they are united. That work finds its opposite in a painting hanging in a different room. Screaming Head, from 1999, shows a lone figure seated on a bench, elbows on knees, hands clasped behind neck. But where the top of his head should be is a wide-open mouth, showing teeth, tongue, and black throat, from which comes a sound whose fearsomeness is suggested by the jagged white border surrounding the figure. The yellow of the shirt, for once, is bright—nothing held back, the threatened pain-filled fury finally coming to pass.
And speaking of a pass: that is what a figure resembling Martin Luther King Jr. throws in another Untitled, dated 2016–22. King wears a black suit and tie as he tosses the football; two of the four boys standing or sitting in front of him also wear ties. We know they are boys because they are so short, and yet their faces are not innocent. Each of them, like King, has one eye obscured or missing. The football is in mid-air, in relief against a leafy tree, beyond the reach of the boys near King, and we cannot see who will catch it. Will anyone receive what he is passing to them? In the background, three official-looking white men in suits, near a dark blue car, look on. In contrast to that ominous note, the sky is the light blue of a sunny, glorious day. Looking at that sky, one might think of “Relaxin’ at Camarillo,” Parker’s happy-sounding tune. Oh, but if one only knew the truth.
Clifford Thompson’s most recent book is the graphic novel Big Man and the Little Men. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence and the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
