Do you want a plastic shopping cart small enough to be pushed around by a doll? Go right ahead, and Google it—you’ll turn up many carts of that kind. But not so long ago, it wasn’t so easy to find objects like this on demand, the artist Janet Olivia Henry pointed out recently. She can still recall the thrill of the chase that she felt while shuttling around Manhattan several decades ago, looking for toys to be used in her sculptures.
During the ’70s, Henry began making her “Juju Boxes,” assortments of toys of all kinds—troll dolls, tiny plastic sinks and pails, little bottles, mini mattresses, and more. Thinking of the West African practice of creating containers filled with spiritual potential, Henry spent her spare time traversing New York, trawling the stands of street vendors and the aisles of toy stores alike. “I could walk across town to Chinatown with $10, and I would come back with a big bag of all these things,” she said.
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Eventually, she began creating “Juju Bags,” for which she shot pictures of the toys she “accumulated”—not acquired, she was quick to note—and placed the printed images in plastic sacks stuffed with shredded dollars, papers, and more. Strung up like gigantic necklaces, these sacks collectively stand in for characters of Henry’s making, including one that she named White Protestant Male.
“When I did White Protestant Male,” she said, using a shorthand for one of the “Juju Bags,” “I found that American culture has been replicated in miniature.” In 1994, when she gave that bag a counterpart for a character named Mrs. White Protestant Male, she made sure to find a little plastic cart, which Henry considered the ultimate symbol of bourgeois femininity. Failing to locate it in the FAO Schwartz under the World Trade Center, Henry later visited a Spanish grocery store, where she found her cart and purchased it on sight.
That piece, as well as the many similar ones by Henry, are about knotty systemic issues—the ways that whiteness is deeply ingrained within our material culture, and what it means for a Black woman like herself to contend with that. But rather than presenting these issues as being too heavy to bear, Henry renders them small and tangible. And she does so with light-heartedness, using the tools of play in ways that can feel funny, disturbing, and entertaining all at once.
Her art has been shown intermittently in New York during the course of her career, but after she was included in the Boston iteration groundbreaking 2017 survey of Black women artists active between 1965 and 1985, she gained greater attention.
In 2022, Henry’s 1983 diorama The Studio Visit, featuring a doll version giving a white critic a tour of her workspace, featured in a Museum of Modern Art show about Just Above Midtown, the iconic New York gallery founded by Linda Goode Bryant where Henry showed and worked. MoMA ended up acquiring the piece in 2023 as a gift from collectors Pamela Joyner and Alfred Giuffrida. In March of that year, Henry had a show at STARS gallery in Los Angeles, followed in 2024 by a solo outing in New York, now in its final days at New York’s Gordon Robichaux gallery. Next month, Gordon Robichaux will bring Henry’s work to London for an exhibition staged at Hollybush Gardens gallery.
Henry, 77, speaks humbly—and digressively—about her art. In mid-November, we met at Gordon Robichaux. Rather than touring me around her exhibition, the artist, who had commuted into Manhattan from her home in Jamaica, Queens, spoke extensively about her years of teaching art to kids. “I used to refer to myself as a scatterbrain,” she said. She spoke of the fun of assigning art projects to students. Then, she related this to her own childhood years, when she and her four siblings would draw on any bags in the house that they could find. Art, she explained, “makes you comfortable, and that’s my responsibility.” Smiling, she added, “I don’t want people to feel intimidated.”
She was born in 1947 in New York, and lived in East Harlem housing projects. Her father served in World War II in the West Indies, and was later able to raise a family through the GI Bill. Before she had even attended art school, she already knew she was an artist—Henry recalled dragging her siblings around and making them produce art alongside her.
When she was nine years old, her family moved to Antigua. There, Henry said, radio broadcasts ended at seven o’clock, and so, she said, “We learned to entertain ourselves.” She listened to her cousin’s recitations of family history, instilling Henry herself with a fascination with narrative-building. Although Henry and her family only lived in Antigua for three years before returning to East Harlem, the island nation left its mark—one “Juju Box” from around 1976 that features in the Gordon Robichaux show includes bows from the shoes Henry wore when she came back from living there.
Once she was a teenager, Henry attended an arts-focused Manhattan high school now called LaGuardia, but she did not study art. “Girls got directed toward fashion,” she said. “I was interested in it.” But she was not the best at the draping exercises fashion students must perfect, and she had little taste for the assignments that demanded “really insipid, crooked drawings.” A more lasting impression was made by all the artists she met during these years, though many of them, she has said, were white men.
Henry went on to attend the School of Visual Arts and the Fashion Institute of Technology, but from there, her career path diverges significantly from what is expected from practicing artists. She does not have an MFA—“I’m the Last of the Mohicans,” she once told an interviewer—and she is arguably more prolific as an educator to kids, a profession she has held since the ’60s.
She steadily produced art, all the while gaining the attention of the sculptor David Hammons and a spot in the Studio Museum in Harlem’s residency program in 1981. At the Studio Museum, she gained a keen awareness of how power works within the walls of an art institution. “The contrast between the administrative staff and the people that I could see on the street became real stark,” she said. Then, in 1982, she showed her “Juju Boxes” at Just Above Midtown, the gallery that had a reputation for spotlighting Black artists.
Several years earlier, Henry had attended a Just Above Midtown opening and was inspired anew. “I said, ‘If I never show here, I don’t care.’ Just knowing that it existed, I had something to look at,” she said. “There were people trying all kinds of things. Some of it was frankly just loony.” Among those people were Hammons, Senga Nengudi, and Howardena Pindell.
When Linda Goode Bryant began Just Above Midtown in 1974, the artist Romare Bearden told her she needed $50,000 to get her gallery off the ground. Goode Bryant never had that much money on hand, and has frequently described struggling to keep her space open. (The gallery ultimately became an alternative space, and closed that way in 1986.) Fearing that Just Above Midtown might close, Henry began volunteering to help in any way she could, becoming what she called a “drudge” to the gallery.
“When you find something beautiful, you don’t want to give it up,” Henry said. “But this was more than that. This was a whole way of thinking. I wanted to have that as my environment.” In addition to showing there, she helped grow that environment by designing Black Currant, a journal edited by Greg Tate that featured writings by Hammons, Camille Billops, and more.
A well-rounded artistic network helped keep Henry going. In 2002, for example, Henry showed at P.P.O.W., where she exhibited a group of sculptural works that formed words like “entitled” from dolls, tchotchkes, and more. She once credited Carrie Mae Weems, a photographer on P.P.O.W.’s roster at the time, with gaining her the opportunity to show at this gallery.
But Henry is not quite so famous as many of her colleagues—something that appears to have done little to deter her. She has continued teaching and producing her art, including NYC Phantasmagoria, a 15-foot-long sculpture of Central Park made entirely from Legos (or “Interlocking Plastic Bricks,” as she prefers to call them).
Henry also used IPBs to create the walls for Crystal Casita (2024), a diorama in the Gordon Robichaux show in which a Black female doll—a stand-in for Henry herself—is shown seated a table. There’s a mini Tupperware case filled with sliced-up plastic watermelon; a pair of teeny tiny sneakers lies by her feet. Behind her, there’s a pyramid of little motorcycles awaiting their future purpose, presumably in an art installation. As we spoke, Henry sometimes glanced at this piece’s little doll and smiled, perhaps wondering what she was cooking up next.
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