I’m an art historian and curator, and currently Research Associate in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I am attached to the “Philip Guston at The Met” curatorial initiative. I received my PhD in art history in 2025 from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). My research has centered on modern art, especially in Germany and the United States, with interests in expressionisms; painting, print, and drawing; the question of figuration; rhetorics of primitivism; queer visual culture; and performance.

Before coming to The Met, I was the Florence B. Selden Fellow in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Yale University Art Gallery, where I contributed closely to the exhibition “Munch and Kirchner: Anxiety and Expression” and oversaw the curatorial team for the exhibition “Printing Darkness,” a collaboration with the Yale Center for British Art. I’ve also held curatorial and education roles at the Dia Art Foundation, the Museum of Modern Art, the Soloviev Foundation, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

My published scholarship and criticism has appeared in Artforum, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, The New York Review of Architecture, Oxford Art Journal, Texte zur Kunst, and a few monographs and exhibition catalogues. My current book project, tentatively titled “Spiritualized Machines: Die Brücke, Expressionism, and Wilhelmine Modernity,” builds off my doctoral dissertation. It argues for the structuring prominence of prewar German architecture and design at the onset of German Expressionism between roughly 1905 and 1910 through the work of the artist group known as “Die Brücke.” In so doing, the project argues for a nascent logic of industrialization in early Expressionism and a new set of cultural, formal, and theoretical terms for German primitivism writ large.

Beyond this project, with Joe Bucciero I am co-editing a special issue of the online journal Selva on Neue Sachlichkeit, magic realism, and their international permutations. I’m also developing smaller projects on the Expressionism writings of critic Max Raphael, print illustrations of Oscar Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Goal,” and on the melodramatic qualities of Picasso’s late Cubism. In support of some of this work, I’ve been Scholar-in-Residence at the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies and a Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program.

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