Monumental in scale, See Alice Jump is an exuberant snapshot of Henry Taylor’s distinctive visual practice, one which champions intersecting contemporary and historical narratives involving black communities across America. Using everyone and everything around him as a source of inspiration for his art, Taylor’s portraits present a diverse cast of characters ranging from sports heroes to people from his downtown LA neighbourhood, to address community in its most expansive sense.

Executed in 2011, the present work belongs to a small subset of vibrant portraits depicting African American athletes, among them Alice Coachman, Jackie Robinson and Serena Williams. On the surface of the present work, historic track star Coachman is victoriously rendered mid-jump, her shirt emblazoned with the moniker of the college that first recruited her, Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. After winning a plethora of national championships, Coachman qualified for the U.S. Olympic team in 1948, where she won a gold medal in the outdoor high jump. Not only was Coachman the only American female athlete to win gold that year, she also became the first black woman to do so, a feat that opened up new possibilities to a younger generation of African American track stars, such as Evelyn Ashford, Florence Griffith Joyner and Jackie Joyner-Kersee. Taylor’s jubilant composition celebrates Coachman’s legacy and this historic moment within her career; See Alice Jump thus conveys the quintessentially American spirit for which the artist is most well-known:

See Alice Jump was a prominent part of Taylor’s critically acclaimed solo exhibition at MoMA PS1, Henry Taylor in 2012. The exhibition highlighted the artist’s innate ability to bridge personal and universal narratives in his painterly practice, as MoMA curator Laura Hoptman explains, “For Taylor […] portraiture is much more than an artistic convention of a realistic painter; the variety that he produces within the genre reshapes what might be considered a conventional language into a flexible vehicle for a much larger goal, which is to produce a multivalent but also highly specific view of contemporary life as seen through the eyes of an African American artist at the beginning of the twenty-first century” (Laura Hoptman cited in: Exh. Cat., New York, MoMA PS1, Henry Taylor, 2012, n.p.). Taylor’s participation in the 2017 Whitney Biennial further elevated his career to new heights, and in 2018 he was awarded the Robert De Niro, Sr. Prize by the Tribeca Film Institute, a prestigious accolade that honours mid-career painters.

Taylor’s gaze is warmlys democratic and levelling, representing all by means of his rich, bright palette. The artist’s treatment of the figures and background, however, is flat and almost crudely unfinished, creating a duality and tension in his paintings that has become his signature style. The loosely painted surfaces and fragmentary surroundings give the works a real sense of immediacy – like snapshots of everyday life – whilst his ability to capture nuances of expression and mood in his subjects conveys emotion and psychological depth. The artist’s talent thus lies at the precipice between raw simplicity and emphatic detail. See Alice Jump is a test.mes nt to Taylor’s distinctive way of seeing, and presents a supreme paradigm of his highly personal view of contemporary life.