Alicia Henry, an artist whose sculptural works elegantly thought-about what it means to be seen, died on October 16 at 58. She had for the previous two years been battling most cancers, based on her Dallas-based gallery, Liliana Bloch.
Henry’s works primarily took the type of spare, muted installation-like items that had been hung to gallery partitions. Many represented faces, our bodies, and physique components, and handled how identities are sometimes unstable, left open to vary and continuously inconceivable to pin down altogether.
She crafted her figures from wooden, leather-based, linen, cotton, and different supplies, and sometimes hand-painted them in shades of brown and grey. Typically, she stitched her materials as effectively. She drew her inspiration from West African masks and her personal recollections, and stated she needed her work to talk to conceptions of race and gender.
“A typical recurring picture in my work is the human determine—the determine in isolation and the determine interacting with others,” she as soon as stated. “I’m concerned with exploring how gender (females notably), race, cultural and societal variations have an effect on the person and teams.”
Many famous the quietude of her work. The acclaimed artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons, considered one of her most vocal admirers who had included her work within the 2023 Tennessee Triennial, instructed the Nashville Scene final 12 months, “The delicacy of that—the sort of tender, quiet, methodical, silent side of it—not solely does that mirror her persona so effectively, but additionally talks to the historical past of creating issues in silence, which was the way in which of survival of Black tradition. A part of the hidden energy of her work resides in that modesty of gesture that, by consistency and dedication, turns into heroic.”
Born in 1966 in Illinois, Henry obtained her BFA from the Artwork Institute of Chicago, then studied on the Skowhegan Faculty of Portray and Sculpture earlier than receiving her MFA from the Yale College Faculty of Artwork. After graduating Yale, she spent two years in Ghana within the Peace Corps, then taught on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Thereafter, she established her profession in Nashville, working at Fisk College as a professor from 1997 till her passing.
Katharine A. Burnett, an English professor at Fisk and the chair of the college’s Arts & Language division, known as Henry a “bedrock of the Arts and Humanities at Fisk College” in an announcement.
Henry obtained a spread of touted fellowships, together with ones from the Guggenheim Basis, the Ford Basis, and the Joan Mitchell Basis. In recent times, she was the topic of solo exhibits on the Energy Plant in Toronto, the Artwork Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax, and Fisk’s Carl Van Vechten Gallery. In 2019, Campos-Pons additionally featured Henry’s artwork in a challenge staged as a part of the Havana Biennial.
When she bought illustration in 2021 with London’s Tiwani Modern gallery, she started to obtain larger recognition throughout the Atlantic. A Frieze assessment from that 12 months praised her work as “assemblages that problem individualized Western conceptions of the style.”