I’m an art historian and curator, and currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the art history program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), where I hold a Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Fellowship. My research interests have centered on expressionism in Europe and the United States; German visual culture more broadly; the relationships between art, labor, and work; rhetorics of primitivism and colonialism; drawings and prints; queer visual culture; and performance. My dissertation, “Spiritualized Machines: Die Brücke, Expressionism, and Wilhelmine Modernity,” argues for the structuring prominence of the machine and industrial production for German Expressionism, in particular the art of the artist group known as Die Brücke (The Bridge). Focusing on their background in design and architecture, I see expressionism as aesthetically mediating a new German subject informed by both the country’s accelerated capitalism and a primitivizing emphasis on affect and feeling. The formal and political questions posed by this movement, I argue, anticipate more contemporary dynamics of work, affective labor, individuality, and self-expression.

Most recently, I was the Florence B. Selden Fellow in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Yale University Art Gallery, where I contributed to the exhibition “Munch and Kirchner: Anxiety and Expression” and co-organized the symposium “Modernism from Madness to Mental Health.” Prior to that, I held research and curatorial fellowships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art , where I co-curated “Light and Tone: Selections from the Department of Drawings and Prints”; the Museum of Modern Art; and the Dia Art Foundation. I have also been a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art; a Scholar-in-Residence at the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies; and a Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies Fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program. From 2019-20, I researched in Germany with the support of the Deutscher Akademsicher Austausch Dienst (DAAD) and the Brücke-Museum Berlin. In 2023, I curated the inaugural public exhibition of the Soloviev Foundation collection in New York.

My scholarly essays and reviews have appeared in journals including GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, Oxford Art Journal, and several catalogues on contemporary art. I write art criticism frequently, with contributions to venues such as Artforum, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, Momus, The New York Review of Architecture, and Texte zur Kunst.

Please feel free to email me at jhenry [at] gradcenter.cuny.edu.