Smith & Taylor: Focus on Two Special Artists

From October 4, 2023, through January 28, 2024, two exhibitions will be on view in parallel at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. One is Henry Taylor: B Side, about the painter and sculptor born in Los Angeles in 1958 and known for his experimental figurative works. He has attracted particular attention so far for his portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama and Jay-Z, among others, but his genre paintings of life as a black person in the U.S. are also increasingly coming into focus. This exhibition, with more than 130 exhibits from the late 1980s to the present, is the largest to date on Taylor's work.

For its second show, the museum has a premiere in store: Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith is his first ever solo exhibition. Harry Smith (1923-1991), sometimes called a polymath, was an artist, experimental filmmaker, and musicologist, among other things. Here, the Whitney Museum brings together paintings, drawings, experimental films, designs, and objects from his collection such as string games and found paper airplanes. Smith's artwork is influenced by the esoteric and the fantastic, and developed an aesthetic outside the established forms of the 20th century. His goal was to distill and reveal universal structures from all disciplines.