Dale Henry: The Artist Who Left New York
Associate Curator & Collections Director
2012 - 2018
All project information at dalehenry.org.
Dale Henry ( 1931 – 2011 ) was a productive and respected artist in New York from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. He showed in non-profit institutions and alternative art spaces including the Clocktower Gallery and MoMA PS1 (then the Institute for Art and Urban Resources), and in the well-regarded John Weber Gallery. He taught at the School of Visual Arts.
Henry became disenchanted with the commercialization of the art world, and felt under- appreciated by critics, dealers, and even his peers. In 1986, he permanently left New York for the rural town of Cartersville, Virginia. For an emerging artist, to leave New York was to risk being forgotten, and this issue haunted Henry for the rest of his life. Beginning in the early 2000s, he unsuccessfully approached curators, including Clocktower and PS1 Founder Alanna Heiss, and artist friends including Robert and Sylvia Plimack Mangold and Marcia Hafif, to undertake responsibility for his work and legacy.
In the fall of 2011, Heiss received a letter from Henry’s lawyer revealing that the artist had bequeathed his entire oeuvre to her, with a modest sum of money to carry out curatorial projects at her discretion, with the proviso that the work remain outside of the art market. Should Heiss decline the bequest, the lawyer had explicit instructions to destroy the works. Heiss visited Henry’s studio in Virginia, and found his work unusual and compelling. She consulted Henry’s peers, including Hafif and the sculptor Richard Nonas, who remarked on the relevance of the ideas and processes Henry was exploring at the time. Heiss decided to take on the unusual task.
The result of the bequest was a multi-part retrospective: Dale Henry: The Artist Who Left New York that premiered at the Clocktower Gallery in 2013—the last of the historic space’s forty years of exhibitions—, followed by a second presentation in spring 2014 at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, a third installment presented at Clocktower’s administrative headquarters in summer 2014, and a final give away exhibition and event in 2018.
To satisfy Henry’s paradoxical wish that the work gain exposure but be devoid of any commercial value, Heiss gave the most significant groups of works as gifts to museums and collections in the United States and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum, the Walker Art Center, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, and the Sammlung-Hoffmann Collection in Berlin. The remaining 200 works were disseminated to individuals including artists, critics, curators, and Henry’s artist peers, in all cases, free of charge.
The goal of this series of projects was to bring forth critical post-minimalist and conceptual works by an artist whose relative anonymity belies the relevance of his work.
Press Release
Review - Art in America
Review - Wall Street Journal
