The Valley is pleased to announce Henry Harper’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Hailing from Austin, Texas, Harper is a self-taught artist who primarily works with chain stitch embroidery on found textiles. Drawing from a background in music and songwriting, Harper creates texts that read as poems and parables, reflecting his surroundings over the last decade living on the margins in New York City.

Aesthetically inspired by American folk art, Mission School art and graffiti, and the DIY ethos of punk in New York City; he developed his distinct visual and poetic style throughout years of trainhopping, making zines, playing house shows, collaborating with other artists, and raising funds for mutual aid. In Ground Level, Harper demonstrates how his practice has developed from the underground up, and invites viewers into a visual and emotional terrain shaped by the tension between survival and surrender.

Beginning around 2013, Harper began applying his signature style of graffiti writing onto workwear jackets using chain stitch embroidery. This practice evolved into working with other found textiles, and eventually to stretched canvas works which incorporate painting and cut plywood elements for framing and hanging. Each of his embroidered works is stitched by hand using a single needle, thread, chalk, and pliers. These works generally take between 40 and 300 hours to complete. Harper prefers worn and weathered surfaces that hold time and labor in their threads, a tactile memory that joins with his gestures- whether scrawled with paint or meticulously sewn.

Part spiritual practice, part survival mechanism, Harper’s texts express a thematic duality. On the ground level is his relationship to the streets, the train, the road, the work, the darker parts of being alive in the twenty-first century. There’s also a clear connection to a higher power – words and phrases that cry out for divine intervention, express the feeling of being subsumed by love, and revel in hard-won sobriety. Despite the personal nature of his writing process, Harper resists over-explaining. Even recurring motifs, like the enigmatic presence of Barry Bonds as a metaphor for the power of love, remain partially veiled. For the first time, in this body of work, Harper began to distill his messages down to a single word. These poetic fragments act as mirrors more than slogans, offering the viewer a chance to freely associate rather than decode.

Harper's ultimate goal as an artist is to send a clear and resonant message, one that can uplift without turning away from the pain. In this way, his work feels profoundly American; blending working-class ingenuity and resourcefulness, a beating heart that rebels against empty intellectualism, and a quiet insistence on value beyond price. Ground Level is Harper’s arrival. Years of restlessness, movement, recovery, work, and wonder are stitched into words as a record of the journey. ✿