Alicia Henry (May 11, 1966–October 17, 2024)
Make Lemonade: Remembering Alicia Henry
Alicia Henry was an artist and professor of art at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. She made art that explored the complex relationship between identity, perception, isolation, and connection. Her dominant motifs were the human face and the human body. She culled the rich diversity of the African diaspora to create art that exudes the timeless power of archetypes. Alicia was a keen observer of human pathos and social relations.
I met Alicia in July of 2003 at Fisk’s Carl Van Vechten Gallery. I was the university’s newly hired curator. She was chair of the art department, which she had joined six years earlier. Not long after our introduction, I visited her office. We talked about Chicago and the Art Institute of Chicago, where I had worked at the museum and she had studied as an undergraduate in the early 1990s. We also discussed the art department’s involvement with the university’s Van Vechten and Aaron Douglas galleries and the challenges we were both facing at Fisk. At some point she asked, “What do you plan to do at the galleries?” My response was automatic, “We’re going to turn our lemons into lemonade.”
A few years later, I’m not sure when, it occurred to me that our paths had crossed in Chicago. Alicia was one of the rare art students who would visit the museum regularly to explore its galleries, unburdened by the looming deadline of a school assignment. That’s where I first encountered her. There was no way I could have known that our paths would intertwine over a decade later.
For nearly three decades she gave Fisk and its students her all, introducing them to the world of art and what it takes to be an artist. She and the art faculty sent students to professional schools, graduate programs, museum internships, and advanced study programs at places like the Penland School of Crafts (North Carolina) and Skowhegan’s School of Painting and Sculpture (Maine). Along the way, she built an audience for her art and received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art and many other accolades. Proof of her excellence.
During good and not-so-good times, Alicia would remind me to “make lemonade.” They were words of encouragement, shorthand for getting the most out of what you got. She did just that. In the process, she authored a legacy that will live on through her art, those who knew her, and her students.
Alicia made lemonade.
VS
October 29, 2024
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