Author(s): Laura Hoptman

Art

Los Angeles-based artist Henry Taylor (born 1958) applies his brush both to canvas and to unconventional materials--suitcases, crates, cereal boxes, cigarette packs--using everyone and everything around him as source material. While Taylor drew and painted in his youth, he studied art formally only later in life, attending the California Institute of the Arts after working for ten years as a psychiatric nurse at a state hospital. This experience sharpened his interest in, and appreciation for, individuals from all economic and social backgrounds, and encouraged a passion to create an intensely empathetic style of portraiture. Published on the occasion of Taylor's 2012 exhibition at MoMA PS1, where the artist established his New York studio for the duration of the show, the publication explores Taylor's ambitious and deeply humanistic project to present a worldview defined by the people--extraordinary and ordinary--with whom we live.