Alicia Henry, American artist and professor at Fisk University, passed away on Thursday, October 17 at the age of 58.
Over the last four decades, Alicia Henry’s work has been widely exhibited and collected across the nation and abroad. On the campus of Fisk University, Henry has led the discipline of art and mentored generations of students, for which she is widely and affectionately known to all as ‘Professor Henry.’
The monographic exhibition, ‘Alicia,’ explores the complexities and contradictions of beauty, identity, and social constructs—including love, loss, play, family, community, isolation, and interaction. Her practice moves across various media, including sculpture, painting, drawing, and textiles. With them, she deconstructs, transforms, and layers materials such as leather, silk, felt, and yarn into figures. The surface forms a geographic ground that references the tradition of folk art and the traditions of the African Diaspora through tacking, stitching, quilting, cutting, tearing, dyeing, painting, shaping, and molding. Each work emerges from the installation and responds to the unique identity of the space it occupies…