The Best of Manhattan Comes to DFW Area!
Born in New York City, Marilyn Henrion is an internationally recognized artist represented in the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art and whose works are included in museum, corporate and private collections worldwide. In 2022, at age 90, she left her Greenwich Village home to relocate her studio to Plano Texas where she continues to explore new subjects for her work.
Henrion’s Mannahatta series was originally exhibited at Noho-M55 Gallery in Chelsea, NYC in the Fall of 2021 to celebrate the visual history of her “hometown”, titled with the original Native American name for the island of Manhattan. It is also the title of the well-known poem by Walt Whitman. In a sense the series represents the artist’s loving memory of a place that may never be the same.
In his essay for the catalog, Ulysses Grant Dietz, Chief Curator Emeritus of the Newark Art Museum and great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, writes:
“Although written to evoke an entirely different city, Whitman’s words still evoke Manhattan as Marilyn Henrion sees it, the “urban geometry” of her native city, the “co-existence of past and present” on the streets up and down and across the breadth of this sixteen-mile-long granite island……She has taken her photographic images—visual lines of poetry in her personal paean to the city she loves—and disrupted them with overlapping concentric circles that she stitches by hand, both softening the slick surface of the image and creating a gently dreamlike ripple effect as of raindrops on still water….This is a private vision of the City That Never Sleeps. Henrion shares it with us, but we are not in it except through our own effort in looking. This is about the texture and vitality of a place that shapes the lives of everyone who ventures to live here, for good or for ill. For Marilyn Henrion, it has been for good; but it is not forever. In the artist’s own words: “We are here for a while and then gone, while the structures remain.”
The artist writes….”As a life-long New Yorker, my aesthetic vision has always been deeply rooted in the urban geometry of my surroundings, from the earlier geometric abstractions to the more recent mixed media works. I am particularly interested in the co-existence of past and present, especially in architecture and other man-made structures. Throughout the ages, the presence of the human hand upon the landscape has always expressed our eternal yearning for immortality, evidence that says “I was once here”.
Much as Edward Hopper did in the 20th century, I synthesize and transform the “facts” of the material world to reflect my experience of a particular place. The hand quilting design, variations of overlapping concentric circles, is symbolic of the ephemeral nature of our existence on the landscape. Whether focusing on historic landmarks with new eyes, or construction sites that testify to the vibrant ever-evolving cityscape, my objective is to illuminate beauty in unexpected places...a subway entrance, a doorway, a fire escape, a rooftop.”
Hexa Creative Hub is proud to include 37 works from the original New York showing in their inaugural exhibition at this exciting new venue which is dedicated to nurturing creativity and supporting entrepreneurship..
At the artist’s request, 10% of all proceeds from exhibition sales are to be donated to the Wounded Warrior Project.