Guyana’s landscape inspires international artwork

US-based Guyanese artist Gregory Henry incorporates memories of Guyana’s rural landscape into his minimalist paintings, sculptures and prints, creating applauded pieces.

His works, such as “Bottle Tree” (2006) are inspired by the bright colours of the Caribbean and the organic forms of African American muralist John Biggers, as well as the monumental sculptures of Polish sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz.
Henry believes that art has been occasionally misunderstood as merely representational depictions of landscapes and animals, but there is far more to his work. Since migrating to America from Guyana in the early 1970s, he has been creating work about “the cycle of life”- a subject that viewers, regardless of their background, will be able to recognize and respond to through his visual imagery.
An example of the work’s thematic preoccupations can be found in “Songs of Morning”, a floor medallion Henry created in 1994 for Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC. The piece depicts a crowing rooster and a moving cow, both of which mark the arrival of morning in Guyana.
Installed in an airport in the nation’s capital, the piece asks viewers to take another look at airplanes and their function for us.
Henry’s memories of Guyana remain a cornerstone of his artistic vision. Nevertheless, it is a universal, rather than culturally specific, message he hopes to communicate to viewers.
The artist’s vivid, engaging works have been featured in exhibitions in Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and Maine as well as in Virginia. Henry is also a teller of stories. The children’s book titled “Chickens! Chickens!”, which he illustrated, won the 1995 National Parents Choice Silver Honours.
Currently, he is a teacher at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia, where he teaches sculpture, ceramics, drawing and other visual arts.
In two dimensions and three, in visuals and in words, much of Henry’s work draws on the objects, icons and fables of his native Guyana.

“As an artist, I have always been interested in life and death in the workings of the environment and its support of those things that are tangible and those that aren’t. In trying to depict such phenomena, I started using simple everyday objects from my Guyanese culture that surrounded me during my youth — pots, pans, chickens and other animal forms. I use these objects as icons that tell the story of the culture and its workings as it relates to the composition of the environment and the life cycle. My interests have expanded to include general icons and fables from Guyanese, African and other South American cultures. In trying to depict different aspects of life, objects are juxtaposed to tell a specific tale or parable,” he has stated.
Henry earned his undergraduate degree in fine arts at Ohio University and his masters at the Reinhart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art. His work is in the collections of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Harriet Tubman Museum in Atlanta, Ronald Reagan International Airport, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Artscape in Baltimore, the Kansas African American Museum in Wichita, the Kennedy Museum of Art at Ohio University, Capital One Corporation and Phillip Morris corporate headquarters.