Cornbread at the Museum

A Surprise in New York City

You still have time to make it to the Whitney Museum before Henry Taylor’s show closes January 28th. If you don’t have time, or a way or even inclination to get there, I understand. It’s snowy and cold here. It’s not New York City’s best time of the year.

To be honest, I didn’t really know Taylor’s work or why I would like it before I arrived on the fifth floor of the Whitney Museum on a busy Saturday. I was there for other exhibits and found myself curious. The colors were bright, the faces were missing some features and instead of making them feel undone it made them feel perfectly, painstakingly finished.

Anyway, that’s what I like about museums — often you go for one show and find yourself wandering around. It’s like going to a buffet for your favorite dish and discovering other things you want to try.

The thing about Henry Taylor’s work is that he is primarily a painter, and in these days of digital art, something about paint on canvas feels comforting no matter the subject. It feels good to walk through galleries looking at brush strokes, at pathways of color left behind by a hand, an eye, a person of living, biological flesh.

Henry Taylor who is obviously a master of painting has portraits of friends, family and celebrities. His work spans what he feels daily and what he experiences through our culture. His work samples the buffet of his own life and puts it on display for us. This brings me to one particular piece in the show. It’s dedicated to his mother, and to the food she made. Needless to say, it drew me close.

Cora (Cornbread) 2008, Acrylic on Canvas.

The thing you notice about Cora (Cornbread) is that the artist has found a word inside a word, and that wordplay makes a world inside a sliver of a kitchen scene. (Wordle has nothing on this.)

The plaque on the side of the painting explains that this canvas is for the artist’s mother. Did she make Henry cornbread? Obviously she did. Did she cook and bake on a stove like that one in the canvas, I imagine she did. Does that gorgeous blue color surrounding the stove and the cornbread bring you deep inside the love he holds for his memories of Cora? It does.

Before Taylor got his formal art education he thought he would be a writer. He first studied writing when he was at community college. When he moved onto a four year school, he began to believe he could paint. You can see it in his work, that he is telling us stories. You can feel that this man, wants to tell you all about his world

But for a second, let’s go back to the kitchen and to Cora’s world, since hers and her son’s are linked, but not the same. That’s just because, that’s the nature of life.

Let’s go back to the basics of Black American cooking, to the iconic and delicious thing that is cornbread.

I can’t help but see it through my lens. I can’t but help but remember the first time I heard of such a thing, since in our immigrant household the closest thing we had was polenta. For the record, I like polenta now, but was neutral about it as a child. Still, I remember fondly the effort put around making it. I can still see a huge batch of it being poured out for the dozens of family members who would show up that night for dinner and singing and drinking wine. It would get paired with thick savory red sauce, usually made from fish. More on that another time.

When I heard of cornbread and had a taste, I remember feeling delighted, by the taste and the surprise. I didn’t know cornmeal could be transformed into something so fluffy. Cornbread was a food like something I knew, but in a different form. It felt more understandable than the sliced white bread we were getting to know, and less goopy than polenta we had been making for generations. It’s funny how the mind works when it comes to these relationships. It’s funny how I can remember the experience but not when exactly it happened. I was probably a teenager before I had this moment. Cornbread was a delightful, low-key shock.

When I looked at the canvas of Cora, I saw the Morton’s salt, which was my grandfather’s favorite. That piece of the canvas I knew. I can remember him asking whoever was going to the store to pick up the salt, the one with the girl. Yes, the one with the umbrella. That salt was the one that in less than two decades had entered into our family canon. We used kosher salt for curing hams in the garage (go figure), and the umbrella girl salt for everything else. I saw pieces of me in Taylor’s work, not all the pieces, but some similar human pieces.

It’s interesting how we assimilate the sights and sounds, the labels of places into our family cultures. It’s interesting to see how certain relationships develop between people who are in some ways seemingly so different. It makes you think that sometimes the differences are not as deep as we perceive them to be. Being American has its similarities, even across the differences.

There is another thing in the picture and it is a type of syrup, Br’er Rabbit Syrup, a brand out of Louisiana. It’s a mix of molasses and corn syrup from what I’ve read, and it was an economical and potentially delicious way to sweeten the cornbread. Br’er Rabbit, maybe I would have seen it had I grown up in the American South. But I hadn’t.

Suddenly Br’er Rabbit was there hovering in the corner of a canvas in the Whitney Museum, asking me to scour my memory for the story of Br’er Rabbit. I had heard the name but I had to look it up to know it’s a folktale with roots in Africa, a story that became American. I had to look it up to know it changed in this land, and became a story tied to the very human experiences of enslaved people in this country. The rabbit’s history made me shiver. I’ve put a link below if you want to know more details. In short, Br’er or brother rabbit is a story with a complex history reflecting the bunny’s capacity to outsmart its foe. In the US it became a story infused with a legacy of collective resistance rooted in horror — of people being forced to grow beautiful food they were not allowed to eat. Surprise.

All this came at me from an other-worldly blue field, in a simple kitchen scene, belonging to a woman named Cora. Through her son, and his years of hard work, through his studies at community college and then illustrious art college, he brought me to her. Henry Taylor brought me and countless others to this place where the story of simple objects told some part of the complex story of her, of her faithful, humble, unyielding love. A son made me reflect on his mother and I will never be able to see the word cornbread without seeing her name, Cora, inside it.

Upon looking at the painting some more: I recognize I like the fact that we share the salt and in some way the corn. I feel sadness for the syrup with the rabbit that I didn’t know, for a story that Cora couldn’t avoid. This makes me linger. It makes the others with me, fidget. Time to go. Three shows and two hours and the group is tired.

After we leave the museum I am surprised by how winter is sweeping into the city after some days of it being unusually warm. I notice the shock of the cold on my skin and after a few blocks I notice how it becomes rather normal.

I know that surprises aren’t always pleasant, but sometimes they feed you with something deeper, and richer. Knowledge is power and that is true, but intimacy is also something quite powerful in its own right. An intimate painting, with everyday objects, and suddenly the world as I knew it, is never the same.

It’s amazing what happens when we taste from the array of personal stories available in this America right now. It’s powerful to feel all these opportunities to connect. Life is this surprise, and if we are willing, a constant buffet. Congratulations to Cora for making it into one of America’s most exclusive museums.

Love, Mariette

To learn more about Taylor and the role of food in his work I have included a few links.

“For Taylor, food is a central element of cultural significance. It is a community binding force, and a mysterious, life sustaining form of sustenance. It is also a vessel for critiquing white American nationalism.” On the Individuals and Collectives of Henry Taylor by Josh Beckelhimer

Tar Baby and Br’er Rabbit history as covered by NPR’s Nina Martyris in 2017.

A review of the show B-Side with lots of pictures (paywall removed), by Roberta Smith for the New York Times.