“You know who I’m talking about,” my friend Renee was saying on the phone, “from the West Indies.”
I had no idea who she was talking about. She was trying to get me to remember an artist whom she was sure I recognized. I know the names and works of plenty of African American artists – most of them veterans – so I was at a loss about who this one was.
I had met Renee years ago when I was a reporter at the morning newspaper in Tampa, FL, and she had called this week to tell me that the paper was closing. That seemed to be the ultimate fate in a business I knew well: Newspapers are in serious trouble.
In our long conversation, Renee and I had meandered through all kinds of topics and had arrived at art. I’m not sure how we got on this particular artist, but she was determined to make me remember.
On my end of the phone, I could hear voices from her TV in the background. I could also sense her walking to a wall in her home where she had hung a work by this particular artist. “Henry,” she said, apparently reading the artist’s name. It didn’t ring a bell. The name MacDonald popped into my consciousness, but it didn’t match Henry.
“J. MacDonald Henry,” she said, and I knew who she was talking about. I had bought a mother-and-child print by the artist when I lived in Tampa, one of my first pieces of African American art before I really got into collecting. I still have five note cards (which were buried in a box). I have no idea what happened to the print (maybe it’s among the artwork stashed on my top floor).
Coincidentally, I had seen a copy of that same black and white print at an auction a few weeks ago. Then I heard Renee say “He.” No, J. MacDonald Henry is a “she,” I corrected, and is a Jamaican artist.
There was a time, it seemed, when a handful of MacDonald’s images were everywhere: the adorable Madonna-like mother and child, and single prints of little boys and girls. They were only signed with her name but no titles. They were inexpensive reproductions that you could easily hang on your walls if you wanted to add culture and faces that looked like yours.
When I saw the print at auction, it brought back memories, but I realized that I knew very little about the artist. So I Googled. An artist who worked in charcoal, Henry was said to have been known internationally, and I found several of her prints for sale by folks in this country (several auction houses had offered her work), Canada and the United Kingdom. A birthing center in Mendocino, CA, even hung the mother print in its new building.
I could find only one biography of Henry but could find no photos of her. She was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and came to the United States on an art scholarship when she was 13 years old. She later graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) with a B.A. degree in painting and design, followed by graduate work in ceramics at the University of Houston.
She had her first one-woman show in Jamaica in 1960, and was commissioned to create artwork for organizations and businesses in Jamaica. In 1961, she was involved in illustrating a series of Island Readers school books that featured Jamaican children.
Authored by Inez Grant, who edited books for primary schools in Jamaica, the books told the story of a child named Nola – at home, on the farm and with her friends.
Henry apparently died nearly a decade ago, according to a message board on ancestry.com. Linda Henry-Thomas, who identified herself as Henry’s daughter, said she passed away in September 2008.
The drawings of the mother/child and children were described on several sites as the “Faces of Jamaica” series. Most of the artwork I found on the web were reproductions, but I did come across a few that were said to be originals, including one of a Jamaican man with beard and two of the children.
The mother and child print seemed to be especially popular because of the universal love that it represented. Jamaican artist Sharon Chacko, whose artwork depicts motherhood, described the Jamaican Madonna in her works as “a survivor who struggles to nurture her children on meager resources.”
