Once Again I Fall Into My Feminine Ways
Maxine Henryson

GALLERY I

Maxine Henryson, Fall leaves, Brussels, Belgium, 2003, Archival pigment print from film, 16.5 x 23.4 inches framed, Edition 1 of 5.

September 13–October 12, 2025

Opening reception: Saturday, September 13, 2025 from 6–8pm

Performance: Saturday, October 4 at 1pm (X is Y and is Z) and 3pm (Once Again I Fall Into My Feminine Ways)

A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to present Once Again I Fall Into My Feminine Ways, an exhibition of photographs by A.I.R. New York Member Maxine Henryson. Encompassing three bodies of work shot in Europe and the United States between 1995 and 2025 and influenced by Rabindranath Tagore’s early 20th century poem Where the Mind is Without Fear, the exhibition ruminates on the poetics of autobiography, memory, cultural history, relation, and place. This is Henryson’s fourth solo exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery.

The earliest series of works in the exhibition, X is Y and is Z, documents Henryson’s repeated visits to St. Petersburg, Russia, during the summers of 1996, 1997, and 1999, as well as the winter of 1998. Represented here by three framed photographs and presented in full in the form of a clamshell box containing 64 20 x 24 inch archival prints, the series captures a post-Soviet city in flux, its streetscapes blurred and architectural interiors shadowed and close-shot. Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ collection of short stories Ficciones, X is Y and is Z offers a vision of St. Petersburg that floats somewhere between history and myth, presence and absence, East and West.

The series Once Again I Fall Into My Feminine Ways is a composite of several groups of photographs taken by Henryson in France, Belgium, Poland, Italy, and Germany between 1995 and 2020. Displayed here as eight framed prints and a clamshell box containing 93 16.5 x 23.4 inch archival prints, Once Again I Fall Into My Feminine Ways traces Henryson’s observations of the feminine across five countries and nearly three decades, its images a visual diary both of intertwined cultural histories and a material sensibility attuned to softness, color, and warmth. Through the rhythm of blur and focus, Henryson further invites us to consider the complexities of personal and collective memory and heritage.

The most recent series of photographs in the exhibition were taken by Henryson between 2024 and 2025, presented here in the form of two standing leporellos, each five inches by six feet, and four framed prints. Returning to nature, one of the most recurrent themes in her work, Henryson has photographed gardens in two distinct locations in the United States: the rural mountains of Vermont (Garden in the Mountain) and the temperate suburbs of Northern California (Willow Glen). Staging a dialogue between two ecosystems more than 3,000 miles apart, both places Henryson knows well, the series lingers on these gardens’ distinctions (red poppies and coral aloe) as well as their rhymes (the familiar silhouette of a hydrangea bloom).

Together, these three bodies of work invite the viewer to trace Henryson’s movements and memories across time and place, following her camera as it bears witness to the stories—both grand and small—we tell about our lives, histories, and cultures. Henryson’s characteristic blur is made a metaphor for the interplay between our interior lives and the exterior worlds we inhabit, each always half the other.

On Saturday, October 4, Henryson will activate the exhibition through a performance titled I will show you the images and tell you the stories. Henryson will be present in the gallery to share the stories behind the images from X is Y and is Z from 1–2pm and those behind Once Again I Fall Into My Feminine Ways from 3–4pm.

Maxine Henryson (b. Jackson, Mississippi) is a New York-based photographer and bookmaker whose poetic images explore cultural interconnectivity, nature, and the feminine. Known for her sensitivity to light and color, she works primarily with color film to create luminous, painterly photographs of the everyday.

Her work has been exhibited widely in the U.S. and Europe and is held in collections including the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL.); Middlebury College Museum of Art (Vt); the former Celanese Photography Collection (Frankfurt, Germany); the Russian Museum (St. Petersburg, Russia); Norton Museum of Art (West Palm Beach, FL); Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (New York) Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (New Haven, NY), the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo and the New York Public Library (NY). She has shown at institutions such as P.P.O.W. Gallery, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Tang Teaching Museum, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, and Hamburger Kunsthalle.

Henryson taught photography at the International Center of Photography and Bennington College and co-chaired A.I.R. Gallery’s Fellowship Program (2013–2024). Her editorial work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and New York Magazine. Her books include Once Again I Fall Into My Feminine Ways (2025), Ujjayi’s Journey (2012), I-DEA, The Goddess Within: Hunter Reynolds and Maxine Henryson (2022), Red Leaves and Golden Curtains (2007) and Presence (2003). She is represented by A.I.R. Gallery, New York.

View Maxine Henryson’s page here.

View the Press Release here.