Nasher Loans Henry Taylor Painting to Whitney Museum of American Art

The Nasher Museum is pleased to loan a painting by Henry Tailor for the exhibition Henry Taylor: B Side, on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through January 28, 2024.
The work was last on view in 2018, within the exhibition People Get Ready, which was organized by Trevor Schoonmaker.
From the wall label: Henry Taylor creates inviting, empowering portraits of his subjects, who are frequently African American and range from close friends and family members to people in the news and strangers he meets on the street. In Hammons meets a hyena on holiday, Taylor presents a multi-layered scene. He draws directly from a photograph of artist David Hammons’s 1983 performance piece, Bliz-aard Ball Sale, in which Hammons sells snowballs on a New York City sidewalk. In the painting, Taylor transforms the coat hanging on the gate to the right in the photograph into Santa Claus’s red jacket, while Santa’s sleigh takes off in the background. The building behind Hammons is no longer New York’s Cooper Union (college), but the Mosque of Djenné in central Mali, built in 1907. The hyena may be a reference to the hyena men of Nigeria, travelling street performers popularized by South African photographer Pieter Hugo. In choosing Hammons—an African American artist—as his subject and reimagining the setting in Africa, Taylor celebrates black excellence in art and culture, displaying both his wry sense of humor and critical social commentary.