John Henry

John Henry is known worldwide for his large-scale public works of art. His works grace numerous important museums, corporate, public and private collections including The British Museum, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois; Smithsonian Institution and Library of Congress, in Washington D.C. among many  others and his work is  widely exhibited with installations in cities such as Seoul, Berlin, Hamburg, Washington, DC and Shenzhen, China. 

Henry’s primary influence is derived from the ever changing landscape of the urban environment. Out of each work grows the seeds of the next, in a continuing lineage of line, mass, balance, tension, and scale. Henry’s architectonic process of assembling metals of various types into precise constructions convey a visual vocabulary that has become recognizably his own. Henry attended the University of Kentucky, University of Chicago and the Art Institute of Chicago, where he received a Ford Foundation grant, the Edward L Ryerson Fellowship and earned a BFA. He received an Honorary Doctor of Arts from the University of Kentucky in 1996. As a visiting professor of sculpture, Henry taught at University of lowa, University of Wisconsin, University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2002 he received the Governor’s National Award in the Arts from the State of Kentucky and in 2004, the Mayor’s Award of Distinction in the Arts from the City of Chattanooga.  Other recent honor’s include recognition on the floor of the Tennessee State Senate in 2004 and the 2005 honorary renaming of North Cermak Road “John Henry Way” by the City of Chicago in recognition of his contributions to Public Art on the local and national levels. 

His recent exhibitions of works include “New Monuments” at the Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis, Missouri, “Back on the Plaza” on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, “Real-Irreal-Surreal”, at Art-St-Urban in St. Urban, Switzerland, “OPEN” in Venice, Italy, “ODYSSEY” at Purdue North Central University in Westville, Indiana and was a featured artist in the Vancouver Biennale, British Columbia.