Alicia Henry, a remarkable artist celebrated for her introspective sculptural installations that explored themes of visibility and identity, passed away on October 16 at the age of 58 after a two-year battle with cancer. Her Dallas-based gallery, Liliana Bloch, confirmed the news.
Henry’s artistic output primarily comprised minimalistic installations that adorned gallery walls, frequently featuring representations of human faces and bodies. Her work delved into the fluid nature of identity, emphasizing its often transient and elusive qualities.
Utilizing a range of materials such as wood, leather, linen, and cotton, Henry meticulously crafted her figures, often employing a subdued palette of browns and grays. She sometimes integrated stitching into her fabric designs. Her artistic vision drew heavily from West African masks and her personal experiences, aiming to address complex ideas surrounding race and gender. “A common recurring image in my work is the human figure—the figure in isolation and the figure interacting with others,” she once stated. “I am interested in exploring how gender (females particularly), race, cultural and societal differences affect the individual and groups.”
The subtlety of her work was widely appreciated. Noted artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons, a prominent advocate for Henry’s art, highlighted the inherent strength in its quietness.
She remarked, “The delicacy of that—the kind of soft, quiet, methodical, silent aspect of it—not only does that reflect her personality so well, but also talks to the history of making things in silence, which was the way of survival of Black culture. Part of the hidden power of her work resides in that modesty of gesture that, by consistency and commitment, becomes heroic.”
Born in 1966 in Illinois, Henry earned her BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago before studying at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and subsequently obtaining her MFA from Yale University School of Art. Her career was marked by significant experiences, including two years in Ghana with the Peace Corps and teaching at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. She became a prominent figure at Fisk University in Nashville, where she served as a professor from 1997 until her death.
Katharine A. Burnett, an English professor at Fisk and chair of the Arts & Language department, described Henry as a “bedrock of the Arts and Humanities at Fisk University” in her statement.
Henry received numerous prestigious fellowships, including those from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Ford Foundation. Her recent solo exhibitions included presentations at the Power Plant in Toronto and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax. In 2019, Campos-Pons featured her work in a project for the Havana Biennial.
Henry gained greater international recognition after partnering with London’s Tiwani Contemporary gallery in 2021, with a Frieze review that praised her works as “assemblages that challenge individualized Western conceptions of the genre.”