Could have been my cousin. Could have been my brother. Could have been me. [Henry Taylor]

Henry Taylor’s Promiscuous Painting – The California artist’s 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. By Zadie Smith, July 23, 2018 (New Yorker). (Also, at Ursula).

Beer with a Painter, LA Edition: Henry Taylor by Jennifer Samet June 27, 2015 (Hyperallergic).

JS: And what is the story of the painting of the couple — the guy with an erection?

HT: I had a really good friend at Cal Arts named Richard Ocampo. He had a stroke when he was 28 years old and was paralyzed from the head down. But he was so positive. His wife said to me, “He can still fuck.” I said, “Right on.” One day I was making a painting of him and that’s what happened with the painting. He was a badass dude.

artpace, Spring 2015.

What is the narrative of your exhibition?
When I came here I hadn’t visited in years, but my grandparents are from Texas and my family still has property in east Texas. Being here conjured up so many memories from the past. My grandfather was shot and killed in 1933 and my nine-year-old father had to help my grandmother pick up his body and move it in a wagon. My dad didn’t talk about his father unless he was drinking and on occasion he would call me up saying “They shot my dad, they shot my dad!,” which became the title of the show. I thought of my dad as a strong man, so these calls were a 180-degree shift in my perception of him.

I originally wanted to make a video during my residency to take advantage of the opportunity I was given. And while that didn’t happen, the paintings became a storyboard for the narrative I would have shown in a video.

Henry Taylor With a New Film by Kahlil Joseph,
September 10 – November 5, 2016, Blum & Poe.

On the evening of the opening, a performance collaboratively conceived by Taylor and close friend, Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker Kahlil Joseph, will take place in the third gallery. This staging will coincide with an installation of a related film project created by Joseph and inspired by Taylor’s encounter with reggae legend Bob Marley.

Artifact of memory. Recount, encounters…

In 1979, Henry Taylor, barely twenty years old, found himself backstage of the Santa Barbara County Bowl after a Bob Marley concert. Whether happenstance or divine intervention, Henry stumbled into room that was lined with Rastafarians from Kingston, Jamaica, in various states of meditation, smoking, and vibing, with a sole white woman rolling joints in the corner. The scene hovered somewhere between sacred and surreal. Among the men, sitting with his eyes closed, was Bob Marley himself. Henry sat down next to Marley and waited some twenty minutes for him to open his eyes, all the while, searching for what he might have the courage to say to him. Henry spoke to Marley for what felt like an hour and the experience of doing so has stayed with him, decades later. Marley, global music icon, a symbol of peace and spirituality in Jamaica and beyond, died two years after this encounter.