A resounding congratulations to HENRY TAYLOR—whose first museum retrospective exhibition in his hometown of Los Angeles opens next week @moca (November 6, 2022–April 30, 2023)! Featured today in the @nytimes, and in print this weekend, the exhibition “B Side” shares the story of a peripatetic and prolific artist and his life’s work of capturing pride, intensity, stoicism, and simple beauty—featuring more than 150 pieces that include drawings and sculpture, as well as what he calls “painted objects” on small cigarette packs, cereal boxes and beer crates. This survey, with its empathetic portraits and assemblage sculptures, speaks to the larger struggle of Black artists to achieve a level of recognition that is long overdue. “No one else could have painted ‘See Alice jump’ (2011) or ‘The Long Jump by Carl Lewis’ (2010), in which African-American sports stars leap through the artist’s beloved horizontal, and thus through time, through neighborhoods, through Black history itself, offering a vision of the heroic that lives alongside the prisons and the projects, and that exists despite those things, yet does not, could not, erase or justify them. Taylor sees in the round.” —Zadie Smith “Whenever I look at Taylor’s paintings, in the solace of seeing a single sitter staring back at me boldly, not blinking, I also see a palimpsest of stories that I can step into, because Taylor knows how to remind us that we are not at all alone. In one painting, underneath the image that we recognize, we can see the many. His father, his mother, his brothers, his sisters, his neighbors, and his nightmares... What Henry Taylor is painting is that moment, and not only the many private griefs that make us weep and recall the wells that our grandparents got their water from, but also the release of those things and our movement ever onward.” —Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah The accompanying monograph is available in stores now—with contributions by Wanda Coleman, Karon Davis, Charles Gaines, Harmony Holiday, Bob Kaufman, Walter Price, Bennett Simpson, Frances Stark, and a conversation with Taylor and Hamza Walker. Photo: Ricardo Nagaoka for The New York Times #HenryTaylor @chinatowntaylor @moca