A sense of community action and shared experiences is central to the crowd scenes of Mary Henderson. Within her meticulously rendered paintings, unique individuals gather and interact, both with each other and with a deliberately omitted external event. With the environment replaced by a flat color plane, the event that has brought the figures together can only be interpreted through an examination of the people—their dress, expression, gesture, and other external cues. Winter Coats, with its pink hats and placards under the arms of several figures, appears to show a protest march. Interpretations of the narratives of Henderson’s paintings are shaped purely by the back and forth ways in which the figures interact and how they are interpreted by the viewer.
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Henderson was born in Northridge, California and earned her BA in Fine Arts from Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1995, and her MFA in painting from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 2001. Recent shows include the solo exhibition, “Public Views,” at Lyons Wier Gallery in New York, as well as group shows at Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum, Mesa, Arizona; Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles, California; the Woodmere Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Ringling College of Art and Design, Sarasota, Florida; among other venues. She is the recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship, a PCA SOS grant, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Her work has been featured or reviewed in Harper's Magazine, L’Espresso (Italy), New American Paintings, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Art in America. In 2017, she co-curated two shows in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—LOCUM, at University City Arts League and Anachronism and Liberation at Tiger Strikes Asteroid.
Winter Coats was featured in the inaugural exhibition of Rising Voices: The Bennett Prize for Women Figurative Realist Painters organized by the Muskegon Museum of Art and The Pittsburgh Foundation.