Painted in 1995 while Bailey was still emerging from the Atlanta College of Art, Soular Taps stands as the defining work of the artist's early career; the moment his signature vocabulary fully crystallized. Its monumental scale, nearly eight by ten feet, announces an ambition that would characterize everything that followed: the layering of abstracted color fields with found imagery, personal and historical memory colliding on a single surface. The oval daguerreotype at the painting's center, an ancestor, suspended in time, anchors the cascade of red, black, and gold that surrounds it, a visual syntax Bailey would refine across three decades of work. Shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art as part of the Whitney Biennial in 1997, Soular Taps introduced Bailey to the critical establishment at the highest level. It has not appeared publicly since.