When I pull up in front of the house, Danny Fox is posted up on the front porch, Sunday paper spread out in front of him. The plan is to roll Downtown and check out his new show, “The Rain It Raineth Every Day,” which opens this Friday at Chinatown Taylor’s, the—you guessed it—Chinatown gallery founded by LA’s reigning visual poet laureate, the inimitable and unstoppable Henry Taylor. Fox, 38, and Henry go back about a decade; they first collided back in 2015 at a pub across the street from Danny’s London studio, when Henry, 66, was in town doing a residency at White Chapel Gallery. When I ask Taylor what sort of magic ensued that fateful night, he says “I don’t know—we played ping pong and maybe did a shot!” Fox adds more color: “Henry called me the next day and asked if I could find him some stamps.”
I first met Danny Fox back in 2016 through our mutual friend, the artist Wes Lang. By the end of the hang he’d asked me if I wanted to write something for an exhibit he was doing at Sotheby’s; soon after, we reconvened at his studio in Downtown LA, a stone’s throw from the Nickel Diner, the sadly now-defunct home of the bacon-maple glazed donut. After that we bumped into each other from time to time, often at Clark Street Diner, near Bronson Canyon, where we both lived at the time. One of my all-time fave encounters, however, wasn’t actually even an encounter. I was in LA’s Arts District, taking a few moments to myself atop the 4th Street Bridge, staring out over the muddy trickle of the L.A. River, when I spotted Danny traipsing down Santa Fe Ave, totally alone and singing at the top of his lungs.
”Henry’s just putting on a shirt or something,” Fox says when I approach the porch. Not unlike Fox on the aforementioned Downtown LA day, Taylor can be heard inside the house, belting out something not quite discernible but definitively punctuated by an effusive pair of “Yah Mahn’s!” After a quick reunion at the dining room table, we board our various vehicles and roll down to LA’s Chinatown, geographic body double for every abandoned amusement park ever rendered in the original Scooby Doo cartoon.
