Henry Taylor

From 1984–1994, Los Angeles-based painter Henry Taylor worked as a psychiatric technician at Camarillo State Mental Hospital. Curated by Yael Lipschutz and Michael Lipschutz, Camarillo State Hospital consists of Taylor’s earliest works, the drawings and paintings created during his employment at the facility. Depicting patients and buildings, the deeply personal series is a window onto the formation of Taylor’s singular vision and a record of a mental health institution that holds a special place in American history and popular culture. Once the largest psychiatric facility west of the Mississippi, Camarillo State Hospital opened its doors in 1936, housing over 7000 patients by the 1950s. At the forefront of caring for illnesses previously thought to be untreatable, such as schizophrenia, Camarillo also treated alcoholism and drug addiction. Nestled into the Santa Monica Mountains just south of Santa Barbara, Camarillo’s bucolic coastal atmosphere attracted Hollywood notables such as jazz musician Charlie Parker, who famously stayed there while trying to kick a heroin habit. Parker’s tune “Relaxin at Camarillo” (1947) refers to the six-month period he spent at Camarillo, tending the hospital’s lettuce patch and playing saxophone in its Saturday afternoon concerts. “Welcome to the Hotel California, Such a lovely place . . .You can check out any time you like, But you can never leave,” crooned singer Don Henley in The Eagles 1976 hit “Hotel California,” which is likewise about Camarillo.

By the time Taylor started working there the hospital’s population had dwindled to about 600 patients. For most of these individuals Camarillo was a permanent home. During the ten-year course of Taylor’s employment virtually no one was released from Unit #18, Taylor’s station, a ward occupied predominantly by schizophrenia patients. Created while he was on shift, the drawings, recorded in a sketchbook, are direct and unselfconscious. Expressionistic and empathetic, they reveal the humanity of people frequently relegated to invisibility. Some drawings are intense, while others are not particularly extreme in their psychological characterization and are remarkable more for how ordinary the faces look. The canvases Taylor made at Camarillo refer to iconic places at the hospital, such as Untitled (The Door), 1994. Day Hall (1992), a painting featuring a man in diapers standing amidst a group of fellow patients was partially burned in a 2009 house fire, imbuing the piece with added mystery.

A body of work that could have easily been lost and that was not created for any market purpose, Taylor completed the Camarillo State Hospital series while studying at Oxnard Community College under painter James Jarvaise. Never before exhibited, the works are a record of Taylor’s early career and of this haunted institution, which closed in 1997. Camarillo State Hospital is the inaugural show at Henry Taylor’s, an open-format exhibition space located in downtown Los Angeles.