Warning Shots Not Required: Henry Taylor Proves His Undeniable Genius at MoCA Los Angeles

text and photographs by Oliver Kupper

This is his house. This is his city. This is Henry’s world. In the earth-shattering career survey of Henry Taylor’s oeuvre at MOCA Grand Ave. in Los Angeles, the artist proves beyond a reasonable doubt that he is one of the most important painters of our generation. Organized thematically, not chronologically, B Side is a tragicomic traversal, a dissection of the artist’s prolific body of work, but also a glorious star-spangled journey into the heart of a racialized America. Like a Max Roach drum solo or a Duke Ellington intro, the survey is an abstract confession of genius in a collective of large, energized paint strokes. There are friends, lovers, family, and humanized portrayals of people living, or more so surviving, on Skid Row. There is Miles Davis and his wife Cicely Tyson outside Obama’s White House—a distinct psychological examination of a "post-racial" America. Black Americana as a speculative exercise in fictional temporalities—the notion of hanging on to a dream like a vertical rock cliff. There is Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, in full military regalia with the words ‘Tupac’ and ‘Coffee’—two cultural exports with distinctly colonial and revolutionary implications. There is track and fielder Carl Lewis long jumping past a white picket fence with a prison looming behind him and the word ‘gold’ written in large stenciled lettering. Indeed, a carceral foreboding looms over these paintings as a distinct soliloquy of Black life in America, and the thin blue line pierces through with horrifying consequences. In THE TIMES THAY AINT CHANGING, FAST ENOUGH! (2017), the killing of Philando Castile is captured in stark blocks of color: a body slumped over, arms clutching an invisible bullet wound, a twisted car seat, a white hand holding a 9mm glock. B Side also delivers a vast breadth of rarely seen works, like his sketches made during his ten-year stint working at the Camarillo State Mental Hospital where the likes of Charlie Parker and jazz pianist Phineas Newborn Jr. went to fight their addictions to heroin. There are also painted objects, like cigarettes, cereal boxes, and even a black typewriter case with the words: “I try to be write aint TRY’n to be WHITE.” In the end, you can never demand more, because Henry Taylor gives every part of himself. You are too stunned to flip the record over, so you let the stylus fall into the last groove where it crackles gently, romantically, to the edge of your reverie.

Henry Taylor: B Side is on view through April 30 at MOCA Grand Avenue

 
 

Museum Of Contemporary Art Los Angeles 2019 40th Anniversary Benefit Celebrating The Artists

photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Highlights From The Printed Matter LA Art Book Fair @ MoCA Geffen

Initiated in 2013, Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair (LAABF) is the companion fair to the NY Art Book Fair. Free and open to the public, the two fairs are among the leading international gatherings for the distribution of artists’ books, celebrating the full breadth of the art publishing community.

Held at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in downtown Los Angeles over three days, the 2019 LA Art Book Fair hosted 390 exhibitors from 31 countries, including a broad range of artists and collectives, small presses, institutions, galleries, antiquarian booksellers, and distributors. The event draws more than 35,000 individuals including book lovers, collectors, artists, and art world professionals each year. With a commitment to diversity and representation, the fair serves as a meeting place for an extended community of publishers and book enthusiasts, as well as a site for dialogue and exchange around all facets of arts publishing. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Laura Owens @ The Geffen Contemporary At MOCA In Los Angeles

For more than twenty years, Los Angeles–based artist Laura Owens has pioneered an innovative approach to painting that has made her one of the most influential artists of her generation. Her bold and experimental work challenges traditional assumptions about figuration and abstraction, as well as the relationships between avant-garde art, craft, pop culture, and technology.  This mid-career survey, the most comprehensive of Owens’s work to-date, features approximately 60 paintings from the mid-1990s until today. The exhibition will highlight her significant strides over the past few years, showing how the early work sets the stage for gripping new paintings and installations. The exhibition is on view through March 25, 2019 at The Geffen Contemporary At MOCA 152 N Central Ave, Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

One Day At A Time: Manny Farber And Termite Art @ MOCA In Los Angeles

One Day At A Time is inspired by American painter and film critic Manny Farber and his legendary underground essay “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” (1962). One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art features approximately thirty artists and more than 100 works of painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, and sound dating from the 1950s to the present. The exhibition is conceived as a cross between a monographic exhibition and a group show—an experiment in exhibition-making in the spirit of Farber’s call for an art of “both observing and being in the world.” The exhibition will open on October 14 and is on view through March 11, 2019 at The Museum of Contemporary Art 250 South Grand Ave, Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Fixed: A Piece Choreographed By Chris Emile Of No)one. Art House @ MOCA In Los Angeles

Chris Emile and No)one. Art House presented a choreographed performance in response to Haegue Yang’s Strange Fruit (2012-13), part of MOCA’s permanent collection. Yang’s work takes its title from the anti-lynching anthem famously recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939. Using Yang’s installation as its stage, Emile’s performance examines the public display and consumption of violence against marginalized bodies and investigates how Black Americans process trauma. The performance expands the dialogue between Yang’s Strange Fruit and the protest song of the same name. Chris Emile, the choreographer, is the cofounder of No)one. Art House, a collective that produces movement-based installations in unconventional spaces throughout Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock

Read Our Interview Of Lauren Halsey On The Occasion Of Her Funkadelic Installation At MOCA Los Angeles →

Lauren Halsey’s dream-world is cosmic, funky, carpeted, and technicolored; an atemporal, fantastical, and hyperreal vision of black liberation which she conjures via site-specific installations that celebrate her childhood home. Click here to read more.

"Real Worlds: Brassaï, Arbus, Goldin" at MOCA

Drawn largely from MOCA’s extraordinary collection of photography, the exhibition provides a remarkable opportunity to explore the ways in which Brassaï (Gyula Halász), Diane Arbus, and Nan Goldin use the camera to reflect and transform the world around them. Real Worlds features an exceptional trove of approximately one hundred works by the three artists, including Brassaï’s unforgettable images of the nocturnal denizens of Paris, Arbus’s most memorable and unsettling portraits, and Goldin’s searingly poignant documentation of herself and her community. "Real Worlds" will be on view at MOCA from March 4th through September 3rd. photographs by Oliver Kupper.

Selections from the Permanent Collection: Sterling Ruby "Soft Works" @ The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in Los Angeles

Shown in the United States for the first time, Ruby’s SOFT WORK is a large-scale installation of stuffed fabric sculptures in unsettling biomorphic forms. Appendaged cushions and gaping, fang-filled mouths are manically arranged as sausage link–like drips from the ceiling, coiled heaps across the floor, and slumping, abject forms throughout the space. Using textiles that evoke the colors and motifs of the American flag, the sprawling installation offers up that iconic symbol of national pride as an intensely visceral experience—a political scene filled with performative “bodies” that seem to manifest both theater and playground simultaneously. On view until June 12, 2017 at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Kupper

A Sneak Preview Of Kerry James Marshall's 35-Year Retrospective "Mastry" @ MoCA In Los Angeles

MOCA presents a 35-year retrospective of painter Kerry James Marshall, co-organized by the MCA Chicago, MOCA, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art under the leadership of MOCA’s Chief Curator Helen Molesworth. Marshall’s figurative paintings have been joyful in their consistent portrayal of African Americans. The now nearly 600 year history of painting contains remarkably few African American painters and even fewer representations of black people. Marshall, a child of the civil rights era, set out to redress this absence. “You can’t be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grow up in South Central [Los Angeles] near the Black Panthers headquarters,” Marshall has said, “and not feel like you’ve got some kind of social responsibility. You can’t move to Watts in 1963 and not speak about it. That determined a lot of where my work was going to go…” Kerry James Marshall "Mastry" will be on view from March 12 to July 3, 2017 at MoCA in Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Mickalene Thomas "Do I Look Like a Lady?" @ MOCA Los Angeles

MOCA presents Mickalene Thomas "Do I Look Like a Lady?," an exhibition of new and recent work by New York–based artist Mickalene Thomas. For this exhibition, Thomas has created a group of silkscreened portraits to be featured alongside an installation inspired by 1970s domestic interiors, and a two-channel video that weaves together a chorus of black female performers, past and present, including standup comedians Jackie “Moms” Mabley and Wanda Sykes, and pop-culture icons Eartha Kitt and Whitney Houston. An incisive, moving, and at times riotous portrait of the multiplicities of womanhood, Do I Look Like a Lady? builds upon Thomas’s ongoing reconsideration of black female identity, presentation, and representation through a queer lens. Mickalene Thomas "Do I Look Like a Lady?" will be on view from October 16 to February 6, 2017 at MOCA Los Angeles.

"Don't Look Back: The 90s At MOCA" Group Show @ The Museum of Contemporary Art In Los Angeles

Don’t Look Back: The 1990s at MOCA comprises works from MOCA’s permanent collection that identify the recent decade’s key concerns and transformations, including many that have not been on view since originally shown and acquired. If the 1980s were shaped by the advent of identity politics, producing significant works that examined the nexus of race, gender, and sexuality, the 1990s both extended and challenged these ideas. Many artists turned to large-scale installations as a way to convey a complicated interface between the public and the museum, or to articulate the realms of overlap and dissonance in individual and public identities. The exhibition includes works by Catherine Opie, Cady Noland, Sarah Sze, and Paul McCarthy, among others, and explores the complexities of the period by dividing the presentation into six thematically grouped sections, titled: Installation; The Outmoded; Noir America; Place and Identity; Touch, Intimacy, and Queerness; and Space, Place, and Scale. Don’t Look Back: The 1990s at MOCA will be on view until July 11, 2016 at the Museum of Contemporary Art In Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Marina Abramović: An Artist's Life Manifesto

On Saturday, November 12, renowned performance artist Marina Abramović brought her manifesto to Grand Avenue, as the artistic director of MOCA’s 2011 gala, An Artist’s Life Manifesto. Abramović arrived with 85 performers to serve as human centerpieces on dinner tables and enough white lab coats, her prescribed gala-tent attire, to outfit the 750 guests who attended.

Under the Big Black Sun

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Film still from experimental filmmaker Bruce Connor's Marilyn Times Five.  As part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time initiative, MOCA Los Angeles will present Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974–1981, on view at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA from October 1, 2011 – featuring works by more than 130 artists, this exhibition is the most comprehensive survey to examine the exceptional diversity of art practices in California during the mid- to late 1970s.