Bio
For over five decades, New York based artist and designer Judith Henry created evocative, multimedia artworks and books that explore the friction between interior life and the public self. Her montages of image and narrative using the detritus of the everyday are commentaries on identity, anonymity, and anomie. To explore these subjects, she incorporates the trope of a mask, as evidenced in several series of photographs, Girls, Girls, Girls (2013); The Artist is Hiding (2014); Me as Her in Williamsburg (2017); and the latest, Beauty Masks: Portraits (2020), a self-published photobook, that is a mash-up of beauty, youth, and aging. Her graphic photobook Overheard Book Series, (Overheard at the Museum, Overheard at the Bookstore, Overheard While Shopping and Overheard in Love), published by Universe/Rizzoli (2000-2006), consist of overheard conversations in text and photos paired in surprising juxtapositions. Atria Books published a continuation of this series in 2006. An earlier work, Anonymous True Stories published in 1996 with Commonplace Books, was based on highly personal anecdotes from Henry’s tape recordings of women who remain anonymous.
In 1976, Henry created with the late artist Jaime Davidovich the now legendary Wooster enterprises whose conceptual paper products were sold nationally. The popular Crumpled Paper Stationery, which she designed, was produced and sold by The Museum of Modern Art for over 25 years. In addition, Henry worked as a book designer at Alfred A. Knopf, Harry Abrams, Inc., and as an art director for several Time Life Books series.
In New York, Henry’s work has been exhibited by BravinLee Programs, where her most recent exhibition Casting Call (2018) was of 300 small, idiosyncratic sculptures. Other recent solo shows were at Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, 2016 and The National Arts Club, 2017. Her work has been included in group exhibitions nationally and internationally in Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Istanbul, London, and Switzerland.
Artist's Statement
I repurpose a cornucopia of materials like newspapers, magazines, sound recordings, film clips, internet appropriations, and studio detritus in poignant and amusing explorations of identity. These tools enable me to explore the misalignments between cultural representation and inner psychology. Contradiction and anonymity become a source of freedom. Having pursued a detached, perhaps secretive, or voyeuristic observation of people throughout my career, I feel that my work has evolved into an inevitably revelatory depiction of human nature in all its diversion and mass commonality. Each person is a matchless original as well as a seemingly mass-produced, stereotypical member of this or that faction—a strikingly featureless face in the crowd. As an artist, I have taken on a role of listener and observer, my work is a documentation of the teeming communion of diverse human beings. Through the use of text, photographic imagery, painting and sculpture, I study and reveal the recurring patterns formed by the motions of living, the gestures as different as snowflakes but packing together like snow. As different as each of us is, our sameness prevails.