SCULPTURE MAGAZINE: John Henry Interview August 28, 2008


John Henry (b. 1943) is one of the world’s most prominent sculptors with large-scale outdoor installations on five continents and work in top museums and private collections. His sculptures recall Constructivism, but the Russians only made visionary drawings while Henry has built more than 2,000 architectonic structures at various scales from long shafts and hollow plates of steel. His vocabulary is simple. His results are both powerful and subtle.

Between November of 2008 and May of 2009, Henry will have a huge retrospective: eight simultaneous exhibitions of his work in Florida art museums and public spaces. In each participating city—Boca Raton, Miami, Naples, Orlando, Sarasota, Tampa, and Tallahassee—the artist will install a 50 to 80 ft tall monumental sculpture at a public site while the local art museum hosts an exhibition that highlights some aspect of his work and career. There will be two exhibitions in Miami, one in the museum and one in the library. The artist will exhibit 160 sculptures in all, which build on his current work.

Henry has a long-standing interest in the idea of works of art encompassing a large tract of land. The Florida exhibitions, which he calls The Peninsula Project, bring his large-scale works together so they can talk to each other. “Each of my sculptures,” he states, “is part of a continuous sentence. They all reference one another. Each is an individual part of a greater whole. In many regards, my sculptures may be seen as all one work.”

The artist feels a strong personal affinity for Florida because he lived and worked in the state for ten years. He calls the Florida peninsula “a unique geographic environment with its two coastlines on separate major bodies of water that offer the sunrise on the east coast and sunset on the west.” Visitors will be able to go from one Henry show to the next without traveling long distances.

There will be a show catalog for The Peninsula Project. Simultaneous with it, Ruder Finn Press, New York, will publish John Henry Sculpture, a definitive 252-page monograph with 150 photographs, a critical essay, and an interview with the artist. John Henry Sculpture took three years to research, write, and illustrate. David Finn’s photographs in John Henry Sculpture are particularly rewarding because Finn traveled to Henry’s key sculptures all over the U.S., photographing each from all four sides and making many detail views.

Recently, Sculpture Magazine visited John Henry at his studio in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he talked about his work and creative process.