1.24.24 — Taking a Pass

Martin Luther King, Jr., took his case to the people. He could not have inspired so many had he not, but who knew that he was such a regular guy? Who knew that he was just another part of the black community and its local heroes?

At least he is in memory for Taking a Pass. The civil-rights leader stands beneath the trees in a place that you, too, might like to call home, with a clunker of a car that could not quite bother to fit into the picture. The kids beside him see nothing out of the ordinary in his presence—or in the football in his hand, winding up for a pass. If the March on Washington had not been so huge, the Mall might have made a terrific playing field. Henry Taylor's The Long Jump by Carl Lewis (Untitled New York/MoMA PS1, 2010)For Taylor, the real black heroes are always with him, waiting for him and you both to receive their greatest gift, at the Whitney through January 28. But then a self-portrait can be England’s Henry V from the Tate.

Born in 1958, Taylor painted King only recently, but every inch of his life is as vivid as yesterday. Did he number King among his heroes? Surely, but also the Black Panthers and others who turned to confront a violent nation. And do not forget artists, friends, and family. Besides, like David Hammons, they were often as not one and the same. Taylor’s brother was active in the Panthers in Oakland, before retiring to his family’s home state, Texas, to breed dogs.

They demand a great deal, much as King wears a suit just to play football, and one of the kids shows up in a tie. The car is a spotless white. Huey Newton of the Panthers sits, armed and enthroned in a peacock chair, as in a well-known photograph—and the artist often works from photos in search of heroes, much as in 2010 at MoMA PS1. He also works from paintings, much like Bob Thompson and Barkley L. Hendricks at home in a museum, and he cites as models the social satire of Max Beckmann, Philip Guston, and Francisco de Goya in his Third of May. He poses Eldridge Cleaver after Whistler’s Mother and adapts a portrait by Gerhard Richter to Cassi Namoda, an artist from Mozambique. He numbers whites among his artist portraits as well.

King with a football notwithstanding, Taylor cannot take his heroes off their pedestal. Still, he is not just rubbing it in. He is not, like Mickalene Thomas and Kehinde Wiley, making strangers and street people into icons. If anything, work from the 1990s mocks icons and their pedestals, with found sculpture and painting on the likes of malt liquor and cereal boxes. He can face the darkness, in black skin or in death at the hands of the police, and discomfort. A little girl dresses up for her mother, but The Dress, Ain’t Me.

At times he seems almost determined to fit in. The curators, LA MOCA’s Bennett Simpson with Anastasia Kahn, call the show his “B Side,” the more experimental side of the record, but do not believe it. He grew up in California and studied at Cal Arts, where he sketched skillfully and well. He comes closest these days to the casual realism that has become the mainstream thanks to Alice Neel. Still, he comes by his caring naturally. He worked ten years at a state mental hospital, on the night shift.

He has his own way with Neel’s style, too. He makes maximal use of white with seemingly accidental traces. He also keeps his sense of humor. He calls one champion athlete See Alice Jump. Darker, flatter colors pull a painting from 2017 close to abstraction, because (in full caps) The Times Thay Aint a Changing, Fast Enough! Frowning or grinning kids can look sullen or sinister.

He has a knack for taking heroes as friends and friends as heroes. Still, he cannot avoid the temptations of either one. A man at the grill for the Fourth of July is barely an individual, much less a shock. The exhibition stopped me in my tracks just once, with a whole room for the Black Panthers as store mannequins, like a revolution’s empty suits. Still, you can always be grateful for cornbread fresh from the oven. Taylor’s mother made it herself.

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