Alicia Henry
Alicia Henry is relaxed inside the Carl Van Vechten Gallery. She is relaxed in most places, but especially here — the gallery, named after the photographer and Harlem Renaissance patron, is the beating heart of Fisk University, where Henry has been a professor since 1997. She scans the work on the walls through tortoiseshell glasses, moving with a gracefulness that seems almost slow-motion. She’s brought students through exhibitions in this space for decades, introducing them to artwork by masters like Elizabeth Catlett, Romare Bearden and Alma Thomas. Today it’s her own art on display.
Alicia opened in March as part of the inaugural statewide Tennessee Triennial, and it is monumental for several reasons — not the least of which is that it’s Henry’s first solo show at the university. Alicia contains multitudes — collages, paintings, ceramic sculptures and textile-based works, all spanning the length of time that Henry has been working at Fisk and living in Nashville. In 20 artworks, Alicia will give you a deep understanding of the artist’s outsized talent.
But the artist herself is a different story. And she might always remain a mystery.
Knowing Alicia Henry is like knowing two people. The show’s title hints at that duality — to the students who speak of her with reverence, she will always be Professor Henry, and calling her by her first name seems an almost improper display of familiarity. She is known for keeping quiet about her work, which she seldom names anything other than “Untitled” and always installs herself. Her silence remains even as she garners prestige and recognition — she’s been the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, a Joan Mitchell fellowship and a Ford Foundation fellowship. Even to those closest with her, Henry is as layered and enigmatic as the art she creates.
Fisk’s gallery director and curator Jamaal Sheats joins Henry in the Van Vechten Gallery, and they greet each other warmly. They are, in many ways, opposites. Sheats is as talkative as Henry is soft-spoken, but they have the easy rapport of colleagues whose lives have long been intertwined. Before he became the director of Fisk’s art galleries in 2015, Sheats was one of Henry’s first students, and he’s one of many whose life has been changed for the better by the elusive but influential artist.
“I was intrigued by her as a student,” Sheats tells me later. “She was very serious. Always very supportive, always present, always strong.”
It makes sense that Sheats would be the one to curate the first solo exhibition of Henry’s work at Fisk — his education and professional career have been shaped, in many ways, through close contact with her. To him, the exhibition has been a gift.
Alicia Henry installing her work, 2020
“Having the opportunity to handle her work is amazing,” Sheats says. “To see it off the wall, front and back. It’s layer after layer after layer after layer, and when you hold it from the back side, you get to peer through all those layers — the eyes, the mouth. But that part is concealed — we don’t get to experience it. And that feels a lot like Professor Henry too.”
The first major show Henry had in Nashville, 2003’s Alicia Henry: Black and Blue at the Frist Art Museum, established her as a force, and also surprised the students who had never heard her even speak about her work. Sheats remembers seeing her work for the first time at the Frist. “I was floored,” he says.
The exhibition was curated by Mark Scala, who is now the museum’s chief curator. “Even at that time, Alicia’s work was just so extraordinary — so powerful and full of gravitas,” he says. “She belongs in a larger framework, but she’s absolutely original. Sometimes I wonder if she was born making art.”
Henry grew up in Illinois, the middle child of Charles and Katie. She went to college at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, and after that, she studied at Yale. Artist Rico Gatson, who graduated from Yale’s MFA program with Henry, remembers how they met during orientation on the first day of school. “There were only four African American students in the program then,” he tells the Scene via email from his Brooklyn studio. “I saw her across the room, and at the end she introduced herself to me. We’ve been friends ever since.”
Even as a student, Henry seemed blessed with insight. Once, after Gatson had visited her studio late into the evening and was preparing to walk across campus, Henry advised him to take care. “It struck me in a curious way,” he says. “As I walked, I thought how profound it was that she understood that even though I had a huge sense of self-confidence and assurance, I needed to remain cognizant of potential dangers and remember to be careful.”
After graduation, Henry lived in Ghana on the coast of West Africa for two years as a volunteer in the Peace Corps. Then she taught art on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. When she began looking for work, she landed on Fisk. “I had no doubt that this was my path,” Henry says, explaining that she’d always wanted to be at a historically Black university, and Fisk has a great art collection. “It was just kismet.”
Fisk’s archive is legendary. The university has been collecting artwork since the 1870s, and has amassed an incredible collection.
“We house one of the greatest repositories of the cultural production of people of African descent, from across the diaspora,” Sheats says with quiet confidence and a twinkling eye.
That repository includes not only the storied Stieglitz Collection, which was donated to the university by artist Georgia O’Keeffe in 1949, but also jewels of the Harlem Renaissance, like the seven-panel mural in Cravath Hall that Aaron Douglas painted in 1930. Douglas, who was considered the visual voice of the Harlem Renaissance, later returned to Fisk as a teacher in 1937, and went on to found the university’s art department in 1944.
Fisk’s collection is what drew Henry to Nashville, and it continues to inspire her and influence her art-making practice. She has favorites — Henry Ossawa Tanner’s “The Three Marys” from 1910 is a piece she always brings students back to. The painting presents the women at Christ’s tomb as a kind of evolution of grieving, and Tanner’s depiction of sorrowful faces is similar to elements found in Henry’s work.
“You can always see the influence of the [Fisk art] collection on the artists who teach here,” Sheats says. He’s speaking generally, but the connections between the rich work in Fisk’s collection and Henry’s work are unmistakable. During the curation of Alicia, Sheats was reminded of the collection’s portraits by Winold Reiss, which feature detailed faces above simple outlines. He sees echoes of Reiss in the quality of Henry’s lines, pointing to an untitled piece that required her to hammer rows of nails into the wall. The dozens of steel nailheads descend from a detailed cotton-and-felt face with a soft bend, like the branches of a willow tree. It turns the Fisk gallery wall into a kind of nkisi, a statuette from the Congo region of Africa that receives prayers as nails are hammered into its surface.
“I’ve always had the feeling that behind that work there is pain,” Scala says of Henry’s art. “I don’t know if it’s personal pain or cultural pain, probably both. But I can’t look at the work quickly — I have to spend time with it.
“When I’m standing there in front of one of her expressive, convoluted figures, I feel like I’m standing in front of somebody,” he continues. “It becomes more than a work of art. And that is a gift — I don’t know how you get that, as an artist.”
The brilliance of the work in Alicia never comes from just the concept, but in its execution. Sheats remembers watching Henry install her work, hammering each small nail into place.
“She’s constantly making critical decisions,” Sheats says. “It’s almost like a ritual. There’s a rhythm and a pace to it that’s fascinating to see.”
“It is performance art to see her in action,” says Houston-based independent curator Michael Ewing. When he was a student at Fisk in 2009, Ewing took Henry’s class Arts and Ideas. “That class changed my life,” he says with conviction. “You feel like you just sat with the oracle from The Matrix and she just gave you one of those cookies, and you walk away feeling like life is greater for you.”
Detail of “Analogous III”
Ewing came to Nashville for the installation of Alicia, and worked with the Triennial’s consulting curator María Magdalena Campos-Pons, the celebrated Afro Cuban artist who arrived in Nashville to teach at Vanderbilt in 2017 and has championed Henry since.
“I have long quietly cherished the beauty and the mystery of her work,” says Campos-Pons. Henry was among the artists Campos-Pons brought to Cuba in 2019 for the Havana Biennial, the country’s most prominent international art event. When she began work for the Tennessee Triennial, there was no question that Henry’s work would be included.
“I am interested in the kind of material discourse that her work opens,” Campos-Pons says, referring to the domesticity of materials Henry returns to with her work.
“There is something about Alicia Henry deconstructing the surface in tiny, tiny, tiny little gestures that one by one, by accumulation, construct a larger narrative,” says Campos-Pons, almost always referring to the artist by her full name. “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.”
“To me, her work is actually most powerful for what it doesn’t say,” Ewing says. “Not having a title, the tension in the nails when you see that body elongate and stand over you. I think the beautiful complexity of her work isn’t just the work — it’s the spaces she makes for you to be in her work, for you to respond to her work with however you feel.”
To commemorate the show and his admiration for Henry, Ewing had one of the works from the exhibition tattooed onto his forearm. The piece, an untitled work from 2005, is a mask-like visage made up of various layers of leather and cotton, stitched together with that same quality of line that at once tidies and upsets. A semicircle is cut out above one of the eyes, causing a half-moon-shaped flap to fall open just below it. It is an eye that’s been opened, but it is also the remnant of the space where a closed eye once was. Henry is a virtuoso of layered isolation.
Ewing chose Elisheba Israel Mrozik at One Drop Ink as his tattoo artist, knowing that she was also a fan of Henry’s work. She told him she was honored to tattoo it onto his skin. Henry’s influence radiates throughout the community.
“There’s a beautiful duality about her that’s both authentically Professor Henry and authentically Alicia,” Ewing says. “And some people meet one or the other, but both of them will lead you back to who she is.”
Henry’s art is constantly evolving, but there are themes and motifs that she continues to experiment with. Across from the piece that inspired Ewing’s tattoo is an untitled work on paper from almost a decade earlier. At roughly 89 by 60 inches, it is among the largest works in the exhibition, and it’s a favorite of Campos-Pons.
“It is almost like you could see the skin on the many strata,” she says of the paper piece, “as if you could peel the skin and see the many layers of someone’s identity. It’s an interesting portrait of a collective feeling. I think that she’s cleverly managed to capture that — that is not an easy quality. There is a lot of power in being able to create that kind of experience in an image.”
The familiar layers of Henry’s work are somehow still unexpected and fresh in this early work. Each surface clings loosely to the one behind it, like a child’s paper doll before it’s been accordioned out. As the surfaces pile up, the shapes become more simplified, until the final maroon piece is just a vaguely face-shaped ring where there was once a full head. To look at each layer on its own might give you a more complete understanding of the surface, but it’s only after they’ve been stacked together that you can see the full face. The ring is a symbol, a halo, a shield.
“She is an icon,” Campos-Pons says of Henry. “One day her work will be regarded as some of the most important that was produced in this city.”
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The Talented Professor Henry: On Enigmatic Artist Alicia Henry - Nashville Scene
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