Grant Recipients Grants to Artists Visual Arts 2026

Janet Olivia Henry

Portrait of Janet Olivia Henry looking at the camera and holding her arms across her chest, wearing a suede purple button down jacket over a white collard shirt, a white hat, as well as jewelry on her wrists, fingers and ear. Henry’s jacket is decorated with a pin of an animated black cat on its collar. Behind and to the left of Henry is a dangling sculpture composed of beads.
Photo by Christopher Garcia Valle.

Artist Statement

Since the early 1970s, I’ve employed a wide range of materials—miniatures, dolls, beads, vinyl, shredded currency—and photographic processes, creative writing, and craft traditions including sewing, weaving, braiding, quilting, and jewelry-making. I use storytelling to examine archetypes and critique gender, race, and class in American society. My work is social commentary, but it’s process-driven. I found that I could use toys and dolls to develop characters, and I incorporated photography and craft to make sculpture. I created my own medium—one that reflects what I observe in the world and, in turn, looks back at myself.

- December 2025

Biography

Since the late 1970s, Janet Olivia Henry has sustained an ambitious artistic practice alongside her work as an arts educator, activist, and contributor to New York’s experimental art communities. She was deeply involved with the groundbreaking gallery Just Above Midtown (JAM), which foregrounded the work of Black artists, and with the feminist alliance Women’s Action Coalition (WAC). Henry also designed and produced Black Currant, a magazine that highlighted the experimental work of artists showcased by JAM.

Henry’s multidisciplinary practice is anchored in storytelling and play as liberatory strategies to engage questions of gender, race, and class. Over five decades, she has developed fictional characters and worlds using dolls, miniatures, and a variety of processes, including photography, beading, quilting, and writing. The diorama has been a recurring and central form in her work, through which she constructs miniature installations that draw from personal experience and the art world. These intimate tableaus function as staged scenes or mini-dramas, blending autobiography, social critique, and imagination.

Works such as The Studio Visit (1983) and Cynthia and Janet at JAM on 57th Street (2024) illustrate Henry’s practice of using dolls and miniature constructions as stand-ins for herself, peers, and curators. In The Studio Visit, a Black doll represents Henry while a white doll depicts a visiting curator. In Cynthia and Janet at JAM, two black dolls stand in for Henry and her longtime friend Cynthia Hawkins, arranged among office furniture and transparent plastic figures within a Lego-constructed room. These dioramas enact scenes of professional and personal exchange, memorialize key moments of friendship, and underscore JAM’s importance as a space of creative freedom and community, situating Henry’s work within a broader history of Black cultural production.

Henry is a life-long educator and has worked at the New York State Council on the Arts, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, the Lower Eastside Girls Club, the Children’s Art Carnival, and the Brooklyn Heights Montessori School. She participated in WAC’s drum corps and co-leads a Project EATS drumming group.

Solo exhibitions include Six Decades, Gordon Robichaux, New York, NY (2024); Janet Olivia Henry’s Recent Academic Abstractions, STARS, Los Angeles, CA (2024); American Anatomy and Other Work, PPOW, New York, NY (2002); and Retroactive, Just Above Midtown, New York, NY (1982).

Group exhibitions include Insides, curated by Nayland Blake, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, NY (2025); Cynthia Hawkins and Janet Olivia Henry, Hollybush Gardens, London, United Kingdom (2025); Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2022); and We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85, Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY; California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; and Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2017–2018).

Henry has been awarded residencies and fellowships from the Studio Museum in Harlem (1982), MoMA PS1 (1983), the Art Matters Foundation (1994), Yaddo (1998), Light Work (2000), and received a commission from the Public Art Fund (1975).

Henry studied at the School of Visual Arts (1964–1966) and the Fashion Institute of Technology (1967–1969), and received a fellowship in education from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Installation view of “The Studio Visit,” a diorama sculpture of two dolls seated in a small room cluttered with household items. The doll to the left is wearing a white robe, looking directly at the doll to the right, who is wearing a green coat over a white shirt, green pants, and brown cowboy boots, and looking past her. In between and behind the dolls, in the center of the room, is a white sink, orange trash can, and red shelf, which is fixed onto the diorama’s white wall. Both the sink and the shelf have food and kitchen items on them. The gray floor is scattered with rugs, bags, shoes, and newspapers, as well as a trumpet, furniture, and personal objects. Notably, the objects on the left side of the room make use of bright colors, while the right side of the room includes predominately black items. Artwork is pinned or taped to the wall on the left side of the room. The artist’s signature and date, “JOR 1983” is handwritten in the bottom left corner of the room. The sculpture is against gray wall, which is significantly lighter than the diorama’s gray floor.

The Studio Visit, 1982, mixed-media installation, 14" x 19.5" x 21.5". Photo courtesy of Gordon Robichaux, New York, NY and STARS, Los Angeles, CA. Photo © 2023 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY.

Installation view of “The Male Art Dependent,” a diorama sculpture of two dolls that are on opposite ends of a room with objects scattered throughout. The doll to the left wears a black lace dress with a shiny gold belt and a skirt of shiny gold pocketbooks stapled onto lace, bronze arm warmers, two black hair clips, and black shoes. The doll to the right wears a black unitard that is unevenly decorated with off-white strips of paper. In between the two dolls, on the grey wall, is a line of objects. The grey floor is filled with items such as shoes, a rug, a vase, clothing, a ladder, a comb, a clock, measuring spoons, a buggy car, sunglasses, a unicorn with a doll riding it, a pack of Winston cigarettes, among other objects. The diorama is installed against a white wall.

The Male Art Dependent, 1984/2025, mixed-media installation, 22" x 40" x 13". Photo courtesy of Gordon Robichaux, New York, NY and STARS, Los Angeles, CA. Photo by Greg Carideo.

Mrs White Protestant Male (WPM), 1994, braided and wrapped waxed nylon thread, color copies, vinyl, paper, assorted beads, shredded currency, paper, cellophane, Poly-Fil, cotton thread, 76" x 20" x 17". Courtesy of Gordon Robichaux, New York, NY and STARS, Los Angeles, CA. Photo by Greg Carideo.

Cynthia and Janet at JAM on 57th Street, 2025, doll, toys, black and white photocopies, interlocking plastic bricks, 16.75" x 19.5" x 15". Photo courtesy of Gordon Robichaux, New York, NY and STARS, Los Angeles, CA. Photo by Eva Herzog.

“Ritual (Self-Portrait),” a vertically hanging sculptural collage against a white wall. The sculpture is made of dangling yellow, brown, gold, black, and white objects, such as small handbags, pieces of fabric, shredded plastic, and paper, which are sealed in vinyl and arranged tightly together. There are also beads dangling, which are not covered in vinyl.

Ritual (Self-Portrait), 2025, braided and wrapped waxed nylon thread; digital print on archival matte fine art paper; vinyl; shredded plastic film and recycled paper; Poly-Fil; cotton thread; and assorted beads: pot metal tubes made in Ethiopia; batik bone beads from Kenya; zig-zag glass beads from the Czech Republic and traded in West Africa; wooden, glass, metal, and plexiglass beads and charms from the United States; tagua nut cones, slices, and spheres from Brazil and other countries around the equator; Chinese silver flower charms; African amber (phenolic resin); mother-of-pearl beads from the Philippines; white metal bicones and heishi from Kenya, 82" × 20" × 17". Photo courtesy of Gordon Robichaux, New York, NY, and STARS, Los Angeles, CA. Photo by Eva Herzog.