Stitched Across Time: Marilyn Henrion brings a lifetime of textile works to the Irving Arts Center

The first stitch in Marilyn Henrion’s journey to becoming an acclaimed textile artist began in two rooms on New York’s Lower East Side where she lived alongside her parents and seven siblings. It was there where her mother taught her how to sew. Henrion’s mother left school in the eighth grade to work in a garment factory doing piece work. “For her, speed was the most important thing in order to make some money. So, when she taught me to sew, speed was the object,” Henrion says. “I hated speed.”

Now, when the 93-year-old Henrion sews to create one of her beautifully intricate artworks, the process is completely different. “It’s a very meditative, slow process, which I love,” Henrion says. “I would never have believed when I was kid that this is what I would be doing with my life. It’s amazing, you know, just that difference between slow and fast.”

Henrion is currently celebrating her 93 years with a pair of solo exhibitions highlighting a selection of works from an accomplished career that’s taken her everywhere from her native New York’s Museum of Art and Design all the way to the Central Museum of Textiles in Poland and now to the Irving Arts Center. The Center’s Carpenter Lobby Gallery is home to Marilyn Henrion: 93 at 93, Selected Works Part II through February 28th.

“Marilyn brought me something that was really well thought through,” Marcie Inman, the center’s director of exhibitions and educational programs, says. Inman was introduced to Henrion through a mutual friend, and the exhibition came together quickly from there. Part I of the exhibition took place throughout October at Richardson’s Eisemann Center. The second part includes 39 of Henrion’s works and resides in what Inman refers to as a “grand lobby” inside the Irving Arts Center.

“My challenge, when I curate for this space, is to have something that will be in an equal exciting dialogue with the architecture,” Inman says, explaining how the works she presents need “visual power and presence” to hold their own with the aesthetics of the space. Henrion’s art delivers just that.

Inman describes how people were already naturally drawn to Henrion’s artwork during the installation process. “The imagery, the colors, the richness, the animated surface of the compositions are really exciting and accessible to people,” Inman says, adding that “there’s a mysterious part to her work” that parallels its accessibility. “They really do come to life and kind of reach out towards you.”

Henrion explains that her works start from photography. “I have thousands and thousands of photographs from where I live, from where I travel,” Henrion says. From there, she digitally manipulates the image, exploring and altering anything from the color of the photograph to its size and shape. She then sends the image to a company to print onto fabric before preparing the piece for hand quilting and framing. She prepares her works as three-part constructions with a backing and padding layer basted together with the image on front. Henrion then adds her intricate hand-quilting to the front image.

Henrion’s works often focus on architecture, reflecting her belief that “the artist is striving for some measure of immortality.” She believes artists have a desire to “leave something of ourselves when we’re no longer here to see it.” “My artwork does speak for me. My DNA is in that stitching,” Henrion says.

In recent years, however, she’s found inspiration in the natural environments that a 2022 move to North Texas has allowed her to discover as well as her own living space. “My subject matter has definitely expanded since moving here, but it’s always my surroundings. Even when I moved here, I became more conscious of my living space, and just home space and what that means,” Henrion says.

Henrion says these exhibitions allow her to see her different series of works and the evolutions between them all together in one space, something that’s a rarity for an artist with 400 works and counting in storage along with a lifetime of rich artistic experiences to go with them.

Henrion’s husband was a high school art teacher, and the couple were very much part of the art scene in Greenwich Village where they resided. “We were part of the New York art scene for many years, even before I started making my own art,” Henrion says, describing the poets and artists who would come through their apartment like famed visual artist and filmmaker Joseph Cornell.

Henrion worked a 9-to-5 for three decades to make a living and help raise a family before she retired and made art her trade. “I love doing it, and I would do it whether people knew about it or not,” Henrion says of creating art.

Inman hopes Irving Arts Center patrons find inspiration in Henrion’s career journey, and are captivated by her magnificent stitchwork. “I wonder, maybe that’s what people’s fascination with quilts and textile arts is,” Inman says, detailing the “magical” quality of seeing hours of concentration and handiwork laid out in a piece. “It’s just that evidence of the artist’s hand.”

—BRETT GREGA