Structure and Stricture: Paula Henderson

18 July - 13 September 2025

  • Paula Henderson

    STructure and stricture

  • Atlanta, Georgia — Johnson Lowe Gallery is pleased to present Structure and Stricture, our first solo exhibition of works by Paula Henderson, a Massachusetts-born, Atlanta-based artist. Opening Friday, July 18, the exhibition brings together a significant selection of works spanning over two decades of Henderson’s practice, including recent pieces never before shown. Known for her rigorous investigation of memory, place, and the architectures that shape human experience, Henderson’s paintings move fluidly between figuration and abstraction. Structure and Stricture offers viewers a compelling opportunity to trace the development of her visual language—from her early realist works rooted in observation to newer compositions that engage with systems, motion, and the intangible scaffolding of lived experience. This exhibition marks a long-anticipated moment for Henderson’s work to be experienced in depth, highlighting her commitment to rendering complex emotional, social, and spatial conditions with clarity and restraint.

  • Paula Henderson doesn’t paint answers. She probes and renders conditions—structures in collapse, memory held in delay, identity rendered as a process constantly unfolding. Her debut at Johnson Lowe Gallery, opening July 18th, revisits a period shaped by proximity and lived experience. From 1998 to 2002, she taught in Chicago’s public schools, working with students living in the shadows of the Robert Taylor Homes. These buildings—monuments to mid-century social planning and its slow unraveling—echoed through her students’ lives, informing Henderson’s early realist paintings. These were acts of witness: precise, emotionally charged studies of architecture at its limits, rendered with forensic tenderness, each structure carrying the imprint of a social wound.

     

  • In the classroom and the neighborhood, Henderson closely observed how identity is assigned and reinforced. Boys were framed through force; girls through the expectations of grace, beauty, and comportment. The body, in her work, holds both surface and story. From these early encounters, she developed a kind of practiced attention—focused on how people construct inner frameworks when the world around them proves unstable. Her abstraction gathers these elements—gesture, memory, structure—into a visual rhythm that holds presence. Space becomes an active trace of those who once moved through it.

  • The Next Migration VI and The Next Migration VIII are from Henderson's 2002 Migration series, which depict the Cabrini-Green and...
    The Next Migration VI and The Next Migration VIII are from Henderson's 2002 Migration series, which depict the Cabrini-Green and Robert Taylor Homes public housing developments in Chicago that were demolished between 1995 and 2011. At the time, Henderson was living in Chicago and witnessed firsthand how these developments, originally intended to serve as self-sustaining ecosystems for their communities, faced chronic municipal disinvestment, infrastructure neglect, and rising criminalization. Their eventual demolition dismantled neighborhoods that were home to a population that was 96 percent Black.
  • Henderson’s schematic paintings explore mapping as an embodied practice. Her diagrams and systems hold tension in their lines, each mark registering lived experience. The work leans toward elegy—fragile, deliberate, grounded in the physical world. In her later paintings, the basketball court appears frequently, reimagined as both a spatial system and a stage. Each composition unfolds as choreography, where repetition and regulation intersect with aspiration, over and over again. These works carry formal precision and emotional charge, using a sacred modular geometry to translate movement shaped by constraint.

  • Paula Henderson’s two works 5’11 Plus Heels I & II take inspiration from her mother who was a fashion illustrator who would refer to the human body as a hanger for artwork. Being around the fashion industry and its many problematic conversations, Paula often overheard how models were spoken about and questioned why the focus wasn’t more on the clothes than on the bodies wearing them. These two works are a play on modeling – slim, tall, detailed canvases, meant to resemble the shape of the ideal model in shape and size.

  • Paula Henderson’s Bodies of Language series is the most recent body of work featured in the exhibition; from a distance, the paintings appear as abstract camouflage—rhythmic fields of layered form and color. As you move closer, silhouettes of human figures begin to emerge, overlapping and colliding within the composition. Henderson explores the body through both positive and negative space, using abstraction to fragment, obscure, and reassemble the figure. The result is a visual language that speaks to identity, multiplicity, and embodiment.
  • Paula Henderson, Artist Biography

    Paula Henderson

    Artist Biography

    Massachusetts-born, Atlanta-based artist Paula Henderson applies a rigorous formal language to social questions surrounding identity, memory, and cultural archetypes. She often employs bilateral symmetry by tracing the contours of models from commercial photo shoots and transforming them into mirrored abstractions, evoking the symbolic power of Eastern female deities while aligning them with contemporary media goddesses. Through deliberate distortion and repetition, Henderson challenges the perfection and artifice of such archetypes, revealing the cycles of self-comparison and limitation they impose.

     

    Henderson’s early realist paintings emerged during her years teaching in Chicago’s public schools, where she worked with students living in the shadow of the Robert Taylor Homes. These precise, emotionally charged studies of collapsing architecture became acts of witness to both structural fragility and social imprint. Over time, her work shifted toward abstraction, integrating gesture, memory, and spatial systems into schematic compositions that function like maps of lived experience. Recurring motifs such as the basketball court appear as both spatial frameworks and stages, where movement shaped by constraint intersects with aspiration.

     

    Henderson earned her MFA from the University of Chicago in 2004 and taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for 13 years, focusing on the social contexts of art. Her work has been widely exhibited and collected by institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and she has received an NEA fellowship, Illinois Arts Council grants, and multiple residencies. Since returning to Atlanta in 2019, she has continued to explore the pervasive influence of commercial beauty prototypes in constructing self-image, with recent recognition including a 2021 group exhibition at Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, and inclusion in Common Practice, a publication on artists engaging with basketball and race.