MARILYN HENRION

GET A LIFE GRANDMA! . . . a phrase often heard in my family. Next year I will celebrate my 90th birthday. Oddly enough, I find that the pace of my studio work increases exponentially with each passing year! And I still love every minute of the labor-intensive hand work that goes into creating each piece.

Born in 1932 in Brooklyn, I am a lifelong New Yorker, and a Greenwich Village resident for over seventy years. I graduated from Cooper Union in 1952 and started out as a painter. I married fellow artist Ed Henrion, had four children and worked full time to help support the family. At the same time, I was involved in the art world in various ways: attending the meetings of the 8th Street Club where the Abstract Expressionists held sway in the ’50's (de Kooning, Motherwell, Kline, et al), performing in Claes Oldenburg’s Happenings and in the first Judson Poets Theater productions, holding poetry readings at our home for many of the Beat Poets, etc.   

By the mid 1970’s, when the children were older, we built a second home in the country, giving me the time, space, and energy  to resume my own creative work.  At this time, I found that textiles spoke to me in a way that paint never did. Amish quilts were my inspiration, their strong graphic impact achieved with minimal geometric elements and unexpected color work. I began learning the craft by copying traditional quilts, happy to be one in a long line of anonymous quiltmakers leaving a legacy of my hands for future generations. Once I had mastered the skills of piecing and hand quilting, I began to create my own geometric abstractions, always retaining the hand quilting but enriching the legacy by expressing my own thoughts and feelings, often referencing poetry and other literary sources.

An important event in my creative evolution was in 1999, when I was accepted as a member of Noho Gallery, one of the oldest and most reputable artist-run galleries in New York, to which I still belong. It forced me to focus exclusively on my studio work, giving up the teaching and lecturing I had been engaged in on the quilt circuit. Each member has a solo exhibition every two years, which requires producing an entirely new body of work each time. Working in a series was essential to this discipline. My first solo exhibition was in 2000, which resulted in the acquisition of two works by the American Craft Museum in NYC (now the Museum of Arts and Design)—a big encouragement!

I have had a solo exhibition at Noho Gallery every two years since then. I create and self-publish a catalog, usually including an essay by a curator or art writer, for each series of works, all available on amazon.com.

My most recent series include Mannahatta, European Odyssey, Floating Bridges, New Orleans Revisited, and Patchwork City, all created within the past five years (over 100 works). My works have been included in museum, corporate and private collections throughout the world.

My aesthetic vision has always been deeply rooted in the urban geometry of my surroundings. Eventually, geometric abstraction in the form of pieced works gave way to more recognizable images of architecture and other man-made structures. New technologies of digital manipulation on the computer enabled me to combine my urban photography with the quilted artworks, while printing on fabric became more sophisticated and accessible to individual artists.

These developments eventually led to the work that I have been focusing on for the past ten years.  While NYC is the focus of many of my works, travel to distant places has also been an important source of inspiration. By digitally manipulating my photographic images, I synthesize and transform the ‘facts” of the material world to reflect my experience of a particular place, much as Edward Hopper did in the 20th century.

In the past, I would work on only one series at a time. With this year of isolation preventing new travel, I find that I am drawing upon earlier sources of inspiration to add new works to previous series.  Since I exhibit my works primarily in venues that cater to mainstream art collectors rather than in quilt shows, I find that presenting them on canvas ready to be hung as you would a painting, makes them more acceptable as fine art rather than “craft”—a simple solution to the art vs.craft issue.

In my more recent  Mannahatta series, the overlapping concentric circles of the hand quilting which animates the surface symbolizes the ephemeral nature of our existence on this landscape. The images themselves speak of an appreciation for beauty to be found in all man-made structures, whether new visions of iconic landmarks or in humble details of doorways or subway steps. And of man’s eternal yearning for immortality in the creation of these structures.

My work has always been about mortality—the fleeting nature of our existence against a background that often lasts for ages, as well as a fascination with the intersections of past and present. Embroidered on the back of the first quilt I ever made (now in the permanent collection of the Newark Museum) was a passage from TS Eliot’s Four Quartets: ”Here between the hither and farther shore/Consider the future and the past with an equal mind.”

 www.marilynhenrion.com