Mary Henry

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.”

In the past, Mary Henry has also shown her work in galleries—including a show at PDX Contemporary in Portland in 2003—and now 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.

Update from the Artist: Mary's work was chosen to be in the King County Public Art Collection for their portable arts collection.