Napoleon Jones-Henderson

Napoleon Jones-Henderson is a painter from Chicago, IL. He studied at the Sorbonne Student Continuum Student and Artists Center in Paris, France. Jones-Henderson earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA in interdisciplinary arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD. During the Black Arts Movement in Chicago he became a member of the artists’ collective AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists).

Henderson's large pictorial woven tapestries have been exhibited internationally. His work is in the permanent collections of the DuSable Museum of African American History and South Side Community Art Center, Chicago, IL; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York City; Hampton University Museum, VA; Brooklyn Museum; Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists, Boston; and Studio Museum in Harlem. New York City.

"Growing up in Chicago was a vital and exciting part of my life and surely a contributing factor to my becoming a practicing artist. Chicago was and is a vibrant reservoir of African American life and culture--swelled at its seams with warm, nurturing spiritual involvement, enlivening music, both sacred and secular, and constant dialogue peppered with memories of life in the South and the difficulty and excitement of life in the new 'Up South.' School was sometimes not exciting but always full of new experiences and teachers who taught us with a passion and commitment to developing each student's full potential, as preparation to succeed at whatever we wished to be in life. Those years were very good years."
_{—From Brandywine Workshop and Archives records}