PRESS
When you’re an artist, you bring what you know, what you think, what you’ve experienced, your aesthetic, your ambition, and it doesn’t have to be conscious. In fact it shouldn’t be self-conscious. If the work isn’t speaking to you, if you’re not getting it from what you’re seeing, you’ve failed, and no amount of explanation is going to change that.” —Janet Olivia Henry
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ARTnews: Janet Olivia Henry’s Dark and Playful Sculptures Made of Toys Are Gaining Widespread Recognition.
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In Janet Olivia Henry’s Recent Academic Abstractions at STARS, the artist uses dolls, drawings, and dioramas featuring miniature everyday objects to create deliciously sharp commentaries on the nexus of life and art.
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Absorbing and jocular, Stars’ current exhibition, “Janet Olivia Henry’s Recent Academic Abstractions,” is where tableaux dioramas become the central force and unique vantage point from which deliberate performance emerges from assemblage and sculpture.
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Janet Olivia Henry’s diorama “The Studio Visit” (1983) provides a key to what JAM means for nonwhite artists. A White curator visits a Black woman’s studio. Their clothes rumple as they sit in conversation.
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Janet Olivia Henry’s The Studio Visit, 1983, is a small diorama of an artist’s live-work loft, featuring a little sleeping mat on the floor, personal items in the corners, a sink against a wall, and a tiny Mies van der Rohe daybed.
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Janet Olivia Henry and Sana Musasama share several commonalities: they are both sculptors and educators from the borough of Queens who exhibited in the inaugural Southeast Queens Biennial: A Locus of Moving Points.
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The artists represented in the exhibition include Emma Amos, Camille Billops, Kay Brown, Vivian E. Browne, Linda Goode Bryant, Beverly Buchanan, Carole Byard, Elizabeth Catlett, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Ayoka Chenzira, Christine Choy and Susan Robeson, Blondell Cummings, Julie Dash, Pat Davis, Jeff Donaldson, Maren Hassinger, Janet Henry, Virginia Jaramillo, Jae Jarrell, Wadsworth Jarrell, Lisa Jones, Loïs Mailou Jones, Barbara Jones-Hogu, Carolyn Lawrence, Samella Lewis, Dindga McCannon, Barbara McCullough, Ana Mendieta, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O’Grady, Howardena Pindell, Faith Ringgold, Alva Rogers, Alison Saar, Betye Saar, Coreen Simpson, Lorna Simpson, Ming Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems.
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Words are the stuff of Janet Henry's work in this show, words that she cursively traces in ropy necklaces, or lariats, made of beads, tiny dolls, coins, scraps of clothes, plastic, shredded cellophane and the like.