Henry Taylor: The Only Portrait I Ever Painted of My Momma Was Stolen

Henry Taylor's first comprehensive monograph, The Only Portrait I Ever Painted of My Momma Was Stolen, features over 200 works from 1992 onward. For three decades the iconic artist has worked his way through New York, Los Angeles, Europe, and Africa, documenting what he sees. In his circle are artists, musicians, writers, and performers, as well as friends from his ten years as a psychiatric technician. Taylor's topical range also encompasses notable figures and celebratory moments of African American cultural history as well as politically-charged and painful subjects such as police brutality and the prison industrial complex. 

Suites of Taylor's paintings, sculptures, and installations are reproduced alongside the artist's handwritten notes -- accounts of sittings, sketches, and Henryisms. Contributions by Charles Gaines, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Sarah Lewis, and Zadie Smith touch on the nature of truth, racial terror, memory, and belonging in America. This definitive monograph celebrates Taylor's direct and revealing portraits, offering a tonic to a divisive cultural moment.

Charles Gaines is highly regarded as both a leading practitioner of conceptualism and an influential educator at the California Institute of the Arts. Gaines's work is represented in international public institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

 

Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah is a Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist and critic whose writing has appeared in the Paris Review, New York Times Magazine, New York Observer, Bookforum, and Rolling Stone. Ghansah has drawn particular recognition for her longform profiles of subjects such as Kendrick Lamar and Toni Morrison.

 

Sarah Lewis is an author, curator, and an assistant professor at Harvard University in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Department of African American Studies.

 

Zadie Smith is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Smith has won the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and her novel White Teeth was included in Time magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. Smith is currently a professor of creative writing at New York University.