The Henry is honored to welcome distinguished artist Deana Lawson as the 2026 Monsen Photography Lecture speaker. This annual, endowed lecture brings key makers and thinkers in photographic practice to the Henry. Named after Drs. Elaine and Joseph Monsen, the series is designed to further knowledge about and appreciation for the art of photography.
Deana Lawson (b. 1979, Rochester, NY, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and Brooklyn, NY) creates photographs that result from collaborations with strangers whom she encounters by chance or deliberately seeks out. The pictures often depict richly textured domestic scenes in which the details of decor, lighting, and pose are constructed. In this way, Lawson draws on the legacies of historical portraiture, documentary photography, and the family album, but transcends these traditions, constructing images that merge lived experience with imagined narratives. The aesthetics of intergenerational connectivity guide Lawson’s choice of subject matter, with each of her works taking its place in an overarching project that coheres into what she terms “an ever-expanding mythological extended family.” Lawson’s works also demonstrate a special attention to the element of light, as both part of the mechanical process by which photographs are realized, and as a manifestation of the divinity that suffuses her sitters.
A
focused presentation of Lawson’s work on the Henry’s mezzanine features photographs that highlight her ongoing exploration of female subjectivity through the photographic image.
Artist Bio
Deana Lawson (b. 1979, Rochester, NY, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and Brooklyn, NY) makes photographs that explore the Black familiar and its relationship to lore, global histories, and mystery traditions. She transforms observational picture-making into a powerful mode of expression, critique, and celebration. Romance and intimacy between subjects, as well as ritual and spirituality appear throughout Lawson’s work, often within the same image. Her photographs emphasize formal approaches to film commonly associated with both Western and African twentieth-century portraiture practices, in addition to appropriation and uses of vernacular imagery. Lawson engages her subjects with intention and intuition alike, in staged situations characterized by the piercing directness of the model’s gaze. With their meticulous mise-en-scènes filled with personal artifacts and decor, these portraits underscore the psychological connections between people and their domestic
spaces, fusing biography, symbolism, and cultural observation, and creating
expansive images of contemporary personhood.
Lawson
was the subject of a survey exhibition co-organized by the Institute of
Contemporary Art/Boston and MoMA PS1, Queens, New York, which also traveled to
the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2021–2023). Other solo exhibitions of her work
have been presented at institutions including Bourse de Commerce – Pinault
Collection, Paris, France (2025); Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2021);
Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2020); Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, Netherlands
(2019); Underground Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2018); Carnegie Museum of Art,
Pittsburgh, PA (2018); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO (2017); and Art
Institute of Chicago, IL (2015). Her work is in the permanent collections of
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Tate Modern, London, England; Whitney
Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection,
Paris, France; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; SFMOMA, San Francisco,
CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; and Art Institute of Chicago,
IL. Lawson lives and works in Los Angeles and Brooklyn.
