Gregory Henry

Greg Henry is a sculptor, but not just a sculptor.

He is a painter. His vivid, engaging works have been featured in exhibitions in Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and Maine as well as in Virginia.

He is a teller of stories. The children’s book Chickens! Chickens!, which he illustrated, won the 1995 National Parents Choice Silver Honors.

He is a teacher, currently at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia, where he teaches sculpture, ceramics, drawing and other visual arts.

In two dimensions and three, in visuals and in words, much of Henry’s work draws on the objects, icons and fables of his native Guyana. He explains, “As an artist, I have always been interested in life and death in the workings of the environment and its support of those things that are tangible and those that aren’t. In trying to depict such phenomena, I started using simple everyday objects from my Guyanese culture that surrounded me during my youth — pots, pans, chickens and other animal forms. I use these objects as icons that tell the story of the culture and its workings as it relates to the composition of the environment and the life cycle. My interests have expanded to include general icons and fables from Guyanese, African and other South American cultures. In trying to depict different aspects of life, objects are juxtaposed to tell a specific tale or parable.”

Henry earned his undergraduate degree in fine arts at Ohio University and his masters at the Reinhart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art. His work is in the collections of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Harriet Tubman Museum in Atlanta, Ronald Reagan International Airport, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Artscape in Baltimore, the Kansas African American Museum in Wichita, the Kennedy Museum of Art at Ohio University, Capital One Corporation and Phillip Morris corporate headquarters.