The art world still wants to see master painter Henry Taylor as an outsider, despite a star turn at the 2017 Whitney Biennial. He never stops working; he not only paints black labor, black labor practices, and black laborers, he works like a laborer.
Henry Taylor Artworks, galleries and exhibitions. Build your contemporary art collection with Ocula.
Zadie Smith on the California artist, whose subjects are drawn from wildly divergent walks of life—the famous and the down-and-out, the sane and the mad, the rich and the poor.
The painter Henry Taylor welcomed me into his live-work loft with particular openness. It didn’t take long for us to get real and talk about family, the stories behind the paintings, and the daily struggles.
Henry Taylor is a contemporary African American painter whose enigmatic works include portraits of psychiatric patients, historical figures, and friends. “I paint everyone, or I try to,” the artist has explained. “I try to capture the moment I am with someone who could be my friend, a neighbor, a celebrity, or a homeless person.” Taylor’s colorful, expressive paintings are characterized by their emotional intimacy and gestural looseness, following in the tradition of American artists such as Alice Neel and Jacob Lawrence. Born in 1958 in Oxnard, CA, his father was employed as a painter by the US Navy and it was seeing his brushes that partly inspired the young artist to take up the craft. Taylor went on to study art under James Jarvaise at Oxnard College, where he was introduced to the work of Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, and Jean Dubuffet. While working as a nurse at Camarillo State Mental Hospital for a decade, he returned to school and completed his BFA in 1995 at the California Institute for the Arts. Since then, he has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles, MoMA PS1, and The Studio Museum in Harlem, and in 2017, the artist was included in the Whitney Biennial. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Today, Taylor’s works are held in the collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, among others. [Artnet]
Henry Taylor biography, exhibitions and artworks. Follow artist. Enquire about Henry Taylor artworks for sale.
Henry Taylor is a contemporary African American painter whose enigmatic works include portraits of psychiatric patients, historical figures, and friends. “I paint everyone, or I try to,” the artist has explained. “I try to capture the moment I am with someone who could be my friend, a neighbor, a celebrity, or a homeless person.” Taylor’s colorful, expressive paintings are characterized by their emotional intimacy and gestural looseness, following in the tradition of American artists such as Alice Neel and Jacob Lawrence. Born in 1958 in Oxnard, CA, his father was employed as a painter by the US Navy and it was seeing his brushes that partly inspired the young artist to take up the craft. Taylor went on to study art under James Jarvaise at Oxnard College, where he was introduced to the work of Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, and Jean Dubuffet. While working as a nurse at Camarillo State Mental Hospital for a decade, he returned to school and completed his BFA in 1995 at the California Institute for the Arts. Since then, he has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles, MoMA PS1, and The Studio Museum in Harlem, and in 2017, the artist was included in the Whitney Biennial. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Today, Taylor’s works are held in the collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, among others. [Artnet]
His new retrospective at the Whitney, Henry Taylor: B Side, is the best show of 2023, showing his depictions of Jay Z, Philando Castile, the Obamas, and others.
Zadie Smith on the California artist, whose subjects are drawn from wildly divergent walks of life—the famous and the down-and-out, the sane and the mad, the rich and the poor.
Prolific L.A. painter Henry Taylor has been compulsively knocking out colorful depictions of friends, family, and intriguing passersby for decades, without much concern for his art-world status or his market. So why are both now suddenly skyrocketing?
What’s most striking about the work of artist Henry Taylor is how uniquely he captures the look and feel of the inner city—the place where he grew up...
Henry Lamb - Darsie Japp and Family - 1928
Henry Taylor paints people as they are—in their homes, on the street—but he's more than a portraitist of everyday America.
Henry Taylor will continue to work with longtime gallery Blum & Poe, even as he joins the mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth.
