The Armory Show 2022

Both artists observe the encounters and estrangements between the self and community through their chosen mediums of drawing, printmaking and sculpture, generating compositions that effectively are introspective and questioning in deed and thought. 

Virginia Chihota produces unique serigraphic works on linen and paper that are guided around repeated leitmotifs across a series, visually charging the environments that her abstracted figures (often women) are depicted within, navigating rites of passage, kinships and emotions. 

Alicia Henry deploys pattern-cutting techniques to produce multiple, mixed-media elements from recycled fabric, leather, painted wood and paper to configure wall-based compositions that starkly contemplate the dynamics of the social milieu that the individual or community body finds itself relating or in isolation to.

About the artists:

Virginia Chihota was born in 1983 in Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe and currently lives and works in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She graduated in Fine Arts from the National Art Gallery Studios in Harare, Zimbabwe in 2006. Chihota represented Zimbabwe at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 and was awarded the Prix Canson in the same year.

Recent exhibitions include: Whose Am I? I Am Not My Own (Ndiri Waani? Handisi Muridi Wangu), Tiwani Contemporary, London, UK (solo - 2021); Uri Mwana Wani? (Whose Child Are you?), National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare (solo - 2019); Virginia Chihota, ULUCG Artists’ Pavilion, Montenegro (solo - 2019); Mhamha, Tiwani Contemporary, London, UK  (solo - 2019); Ultrasanity. On Madness, Sanitation, Antipsychiatry And Resistance, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, Germany (group - 2019); Close: Drawn Portraits, The Drawing Room, London, UK (group - 2018); The E-qualities of Women, National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare, Zimbabwe  (group - 2018).

A native of Illinois, Alicia Henry received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Yale University School of Art. She is currently Professor of Art at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Henry’s work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions at institutions, including a solo touring show in Canada at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (2022), Southern Alberta Art Gallery (2019); The Power Plant (2019) and the Atlanta Biennial (2019); Cheekwood Museum, Nashville (2018-2019); Frist Museum, Nashville (2016); the Hunter Museum of American Art (2014); Tennessee State Museum, Nashville (2014); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia (2013); the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (2013); South Bend Museum of Art, South Bend, Indiana (2004); the Nashville International Airport (2002); Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (2002); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City (1997); and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (1996).