Henry Taylor: The Only Portrait I Ever Painted of My Momma Was Stolen by Charles Gaines et al. (review)

How does one curate a text on the work of a contemporary artist today? By curate, I do not mean the process of compiling artwork, commissioning authors, editing, and collaging essays and interviews. Although all are elements of the curatorial process, neither one defines the work of the text, the work of the artwork in translation to text. To curate a text suggests that there is a conceptual or experiential intention and heft to this new object, a reason for artwork to be presented in this form. It is a process that shapes the conscience of a text; its edge and hopefully provides a reflexive challenge to the artist whose work is subject, thus making it possible for them see their oeuvre in a more prismatic way. Henry Taylor delivers with mixed results. Although the bright orange cover outwardly grabs one's attention, beyond that skin the text ultimately lacks the follow-through needed to create space for much-needed critical reflection on Taylor's art, which in recent years has taken its place in the art world for its painterly and monumental approach to depicting aspects of Black life often unseen by many Americans, Black and white, as subject.

In the text, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah describes a party in Paris where she and Taylor, the guest of honor, are two of a precious few Black people in the room. This isn't a party with Aunt Pat's potato salad and cousin Tyrone working the grill, the kind of party where one stops at the bodega on the way to pick up a cold six-pack of whatever is on sale. In Paris, "copper tubs full of Bollinger champagne flowed" in honor of Taylor's show and with it, his introduction to the European market. Months after Paris, Ghansah reflects on the party, finding herself still unmoored by the experience. She grapples to understand how Taylor, whose eyes appeared "red and wet," seemed completely unfazed by the spectacle. But her answer was always right in front of her, clearly articulated in Taylor's oeuvre. Perhaps inadvertently, Ghansah's story tells us about an artist who has learned to enjoy the surreal excesses of his moment, to live it in every sense and leave it there because he has to. To inhabit the world of Taylor's Black sublime is to learn how to fully experience and enjoy adoration and copper tubs of champagne, knowing that it is just one side of a not-so-easy, twenty-first-century cakewalk. On another side of this festive cocoon, there is CalArts, where Taylor was one of only a few Black artists at the school. On yet another, the feted, seen, and adored Black artist that is Henry Taylor in Paris becomes the threatening and vulnerable Black man on the streets. Too many can drink to this reality, that for some is also spectacle.

As his stature in the art world has risen, Taylor continually moves back and forth across these lines. But the text falls short of giving readers a sense of this in word and image. The aspect of his oeuvre that resonates most powerfully with various audiences monumentalizes the humanity of ordinary Black life. There is beauty and precarity in his work, a soft tension between the artist—what or who he chooses to represent—and what he gives audiences through the work. If his oeuvre had a hip hop "play cousin," it would be found in the work of Tupac Shakur, whose swagger marked him on the streets before anyone saw his face and whose delivery was as fast as its content was urgent. It might also be found in Kendrick Lamar's redux of the 1970s' tune "Every N*** r is a Star" as he opens the transformative To Pimp A Butterfly album. Across media, these artists in Taylor...