HENRY TAYLOR

Early Years

The youngest of eight children, Henry Taylor was born in 1958 in Ventura, California, and grew up in Oxnard. His father was a commercial painter; his mother cleaned houses. Taylor enrolled at Oxnard College when he was 19 and stayed on and off for almost six years, taking classes in anthropology, journalism and set design. At college he was taught by James Jarvaise, whose daily painting routine helped to focus Taylor’s energy on his own artistic practice. In 1984, Taylor began working as a psychiatric technician at Camarillo State Mental Hospital and—with permission—started sketching patients. Jarvaise—whom Taylor described in a 2025 interview as a “Bruce Lee” figure—encouraged Taylor to apply to the California Institute of Arts, where he arrived in 1990, gaining a BFA in 1995. Although Taylor painted every day, it was almost 15 years before he received attention from a commercial gallery—Sister offered him his first exhibition in 2004, at which point he moved to LA. He had his first institution show at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2007, but this was at a point where Black art about Black people was yet to be taken seriously by many critics and gallerists. However, Taylor amassed a growing band of supporters, including Klaus Biesenbach, MoMA PS1 director at the time of Taylor’s key 2012 show.

Henry Taylor: Artworks

Henry Taylor not only creates bold, powerful, figurative portraits that centre their subjects in the context of social and individual circumstances, he also paints found objects to create assemblage sculptures. Human connection lies at the heart of all his work, whether he’s painting someone he met in the queue for McDonald’s or a famous figure. He often works from life (girlfriends, random encounters, people with whom he’s spent time) or a shared American history (news stories, celebrities). During his 2012 exhibition at MoMA PS1, he painted many of the gallery staff.

• Ardmore (2004) was painted on found wood cutting board. Taylor’s grandfather, Ardmore, wouldn’t pick cotton, instead breaking horses and gambling. Ardmore was shot when Taylor’s father was only nine, but he wanted to take revenge. However, while out on his horse looking for his assailants, he was ambushed and shot again, this time to death.
• Cicely and Miles visit the Obamas (2017) transposes a famous 1968 snap of Cicely Tyson and Miles Davis at a film premiers to the lawn of the White House (when the painting was produced, the Obama family had just moved out). The picture not only asks viewers to imagine what such a meeting would have been like, but also to question how Tyson and Davis were valued in wider society in the late 1960s and whether that would have been different almost half a century later.
• In 2023, Taylor spent a two-month residency in Paris—the Louvre appears in the background of his 2023 large acrylic painting got, get, gone, but don’t you think you should give it back?, which sees Josephine Baker reimagined as a statue kneeling in a golden fountain in front of the Louvre and the British Museum. On the horizon is a slave ship, reminding viewers that objects and artworks were collected by Western museums just as people were collected as slaves by colonisers.

Henry Taylor: Select Exhibitions

Select Solo Exhibitions

• Henry Taylor. Where Thoughts Provoke, Musée National Picasso-Paris (2026)
• Sometimes a straight line has to be crooked, Hauser & Wirth (2024) (and touring)
• From Sugar to Shit, Hauser & Wirth, Paris (2023)
• Henry Taylor: B Side, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City (2023)
• Henry Taylor: B Side, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2022)
• Disappeared, but a tiger showed up, later, Hauser & Wirth, Southampton (2021)
• Henry Taylor, Hauser & Wirth, Bruton (2021)
• Here and There, Blum & Poe, Tokyo (2018)
• The Floaters, The High Line, New York City (2017)
• This Side, That Side, The Mistake Room, Guadalajara (2016)
• They shot my dad, they shot my dad!, Artpace, San Antonio (2015)
• Henry Taylor, Carlos/Ishikawa, London (2015)
• Henry Taylor, MoMA PS1, New York City (2012)
• Girrrrrl, Santa Monica Museum of Art (2008)
• Sis and Bra, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York City (2007)
• Henry Taylor, Daniel Reich Gallery, New York City (2005)
• Free 99, Sister, Los Angeles (2004)

Select Group Exhibitions

• As if in a Dream. History, Fantasy, Future, Santa Barbara Museum of Art (2026)
• Femmes, curated by Pharrell Williams, Perrotin, Paris (2025)
• The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure, (curated by Ekow Eshun), Philadelphia Museum of Art (2024) (and touring)
• Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2023)
• When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town (2022)
• Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City (2021)
• Here, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (2018)
• 30 Americans, Tacoma Art Museum (2017) (and touring)
• Contemporary Galleries 1980–Now, MoMA, New York City (2013)
• Henry Taylor and Phil Wagner, Rental Gallery, New York City (2010)
• Eccentric Abstraction II, 1234 Gallery, Los Angeles (2000)

Further Reading

• Henry Taylor’s Instagram
• 2023 spotlight in Ocula
• Interview from The New York Times T magazine (2023)
• Artist profile page at Hauser & Wirth
• 2021 interview in the Guardian
• Zadie Smith profiles Henry Taylor in The New Yorker (2018)

Henry Taylor FAQs

Ocula