MARY HENRY
2006 Recipient of the Twining Humber
Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement  

Artist Trust proudly announces painter Mary Henry as this year’s recipient of the Twining Humber Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement. A Whidbey Island resident and Northwest artist since 1981, Mary Henry originally hails from California. Her impressive career now spans eight decades and extends back to her first exposure to modernism at California School of Arts and Crafts in the 1930s and subsequent studies with Hungarian constructivist artist László Moholy-Nagy at the Institute of Design, Chicago, where Henry received her Master of Arts degree.

Mary Henry has been exploring and pushing the boundaries of formal geometric abstraction since very early in her career. Her vibrant palette and pristine order are signature to a remarkable body of work which has grown in scale and renown. Northwest Matriarchs of Modernism, a 2004 group show at the Art Gym at Marylhurst University, featured Henry’s paintings and traveled to the Museum of Northwest Art in LaConner, WA. Her most recent solo exhibit, Mary Henry: American Constructivist, at the Hallie Ford Museum at Willamette University in 2005, was reviewed in Art in America as revealing “a senior ‘matriarch’ of undiminished power and long-established formal mastery.”

Henry also continues to show new work—including a show at PDX Contemporary in Portland in 2003—and keeps a studio adjacent to her Whidbey Island home. Among other awards and recognitions, Mary Henry received a Flintridge Award for Visual Artists in 2001. Her paintings are included in the collections of Seattle Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, the Institute of Design, Chicago, and such corporate art collections as Microsoft, Safeco, and the Hewlett Packard Company. Mary Henry will be honored with a private reception at the Frye Art Museum, May 11th.

“Mary Henry’s work is as bold and dynamic today as it was forty years ago,” offered Fionn Meade, Artist Trust Director of Grant Programs. “Her selection by this year’s panel is a celebration of a remarkable artist and a truly elegant body of work.” This year’s panel was comprised of previous Twining Humber Award recipient Patti Warashina, author and independent curator Barbara Johns, and Robin Held, curator at The Frye Art Museum. This award has been made possible by a generous gift from the late Yvonne Twining Humber and was established in the name of Yvonne and her husband Irving.

In early March, a selection panel comprised of one visual artist and two arts professionals enthusiastically chose Mary Henry as this year’s recipient. This year’s panel was comprised of Seattle artist and previous Twining Humber Award recipient sculptor Patti Warashina, author and independent curator Barbara Johns, and Robin Held, curator at the Frye Art Museum.

Mary Henry will be honored with a private reception May 11th at the Frye Art Museum. Friends, family, colleagues, fans, and well-wishers will celebrate the life and work of one of our most highly respected Northwest artists.

In related news, The Frye Art Museum will be opening an exhibition of the works of painter Yvonne Twining Humber (September 22-December 9, 2007), in honor of the centenary of her birth. The exhibition will be curated for the Frye by Chief Curator Robin Held.

For more information on the Twining Humber Award, this recipient, or to receive print-ready images of Mary Henry’s work, please contact Heather Joy Helbach-Olds, Director of Programs.

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A Personal Response to Mary Henry’s Art
by Lois Allan

In my capacity as an art lover, observer, writer, and critic, very few of the myriad exhibitions I’ve seen over the years stand out in my memory. One, however, most decidedly does. It was a small show in 1981 of drawings by Mary Henry. I wasn’t familiar with her art at that time, but I knew immediately that this was an unusual, important artist. The drawings weren’t particularly large or eye-catching, but their subtlety created a mute yet powerful presence that was compelling. The pale colors and the light gray graphite lines that crisscrossed over the paper were seductive, creating an undeniable hold on this entranced viewer. They were, in my mind, like a Bach prelude—intimate, and though produced with a modesty of means, were capable of imparting a sense of the infinite and at the same time a beauty so ineffable that it can only be felt, not explained.

Mary Henry’s paintings through the years have been quite different, both in execution and effect. The large size, the bold colors and even bolder compositions are connected to the dynamic, intellectual world. In one of her artist’s statements she wrote that her vision is based on her perception of the geometry of life, which is evident in nature from its infinitesimally small parts to the structure of the universe. That observation can account for both the drawings’ and paintings’ aesthetic, but it also establishes a starting point for viewers in understanding the content of her art. A reference to its appearance lies in her use of hard edge, geometric abstraction that was part of the transition of mid-twentieth century painting from representational to abstract compositions. Abstract Expressionism, as the movement came to be called, originated in New York and was slow to be accepted on the West Coast. Mary Henry was one of its earliest pioneers and advocates, both in California where she lived at that time and since her move to Washington in 1981.

Many years ago Sir Kenneth Clark wrote an essay (published as a short book) titled The Artist Grows Old. In it he described what he termed as “an old age style,” in which aging artists, realizing their time is limited, become freer, more spontaneous in the execution of their work. He should have known Mary Henry! Now in her nineties, she has never deviated from her vision or her style. Physical limitations may affect her, but mental ones do not. She is the epitome of everything the Twining Humber Award stands for.

Lois Allan is an independent critic whose articles have been published in regional, national, and international publications, including Artweek, Sculpture, and Art Papers. She is the author of two books on the art of the Pacific Northwest, including Contemporary Art in the Northwest (Fine Art Publishing).