Henry Bermudez was born in Maracaibo, Venezuela in 1951 and represented his country at the XLII Venice Biennale in 1986. In 2003, while traveling in the United States, he learned that his work had been labeled politically subversive by the Venezuelan government. Unable to return home, he resettled in Philadelphia, where he established himself through large-scale murals for the City of Philadelphia through Mural Arts Philadelphia.
His formation is rooted in the Afro-Caribbean culture of Bobures, a small coastal community on the southern shore of Lake Maracaibo, where he taught art after graduating from the Escuela de Artes Julio Arráez. Immersed in the ritual music, dance, and religious syncretism of that community, he developed the iconographic language that defines his work: a layered world of mythological creatures and sacred symbols drawn from Pre-Columbian, Judeo-Christian, and Afro-Caribbean traditions.
His most recent installation, Where the Serpent Sleeps / Falling Sun (2026), spanning 23 by 49 feet, is on long-term view at the Frances Maguire Art Museum at Saint Joseph University. In 2024, the Woodmere Art Museum presented a major retrospective survey of his Philadelphia work.
Henry's work is held in collections including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Neuberger Museum of Art, the Museo de Arte Moderno de México, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. He has received support from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Franz and Virginia Bader Fund, and CFEVA, and was selected for the Philagrafika Invitational Portfolio, one of the most significant printmaking events held in the United States. His work has been exhibited widely, including in Borderless Caribbean at the Haitian Cultural Arts Alliance in Miami. He teaches at CADI for disadvantaged children, and Fleisher Art Memorial. Prior to the pandemic, he co-founded HOUSEGallery1816 in Philadelphia's Fishtown neighborhood, a space for exhibition, collaboration, and community-building through the arts.
Artist Statement
I'm an Afro-Venezuelan living in the US. My focus is on how cultures merge and create mythologies that shape how we tell our history. After I graduated high school, I taught art at a school in Bobures, a small coastal Afro-Caribbean community. Living there gave me a unique insight into the African Diaspora in the Americas. I learned about the mystical side of these descendants of Africa — through religious ceremonies, music, and dance. That's where I started breaking away from what I'd been taught in school. The village and its people inspired me to find my own expressive voice. In the dense tropical foliage, surrounded by otherworldly creatures and plant forms, I developed icons and motifs, some inspired by the energy of ceremonial drumbeats — this is where my work began and those experiences still shape everything I make.
Growing up in Maracaibo, a city steeped in Magical Realism, taught me not to think in either/or terms. My work mixes Pre-Columbian, Judeo-Christian, and Afro-Caribbean myths and symbols. I work from somewhere between the outside world and my subconscious — a place made of dreams, tangled symbols, mythological creatures, and plants that shift into animal forms.
When I place a serpent over a cross, or let Quetzalcóatl inhabit the same space as a Christian crucifix, I am not making a decorative choice. I am relating what happened - one culture tried to put another one to sleep. The symbols of the conquered didn't disappear as they they shape-shifted and went underground. They survived inside the very structures meant to erase them. That survival is what I paint. My icons are from the visual memory of people whose ways of seeing the world were never given up, only driven deeper.
In this space between reality and fantasy, I like the tension between opposing forces: Indigenous cultures existing within, alongside, and counter to the colonial world. I paint overgrown organic forms and balance them with the hard lines and geometric shapes of Concrete Art. I cut my drawings to free them from the page. Textiles, paints, canvas, and plywood help build my imaginary world, either as fairly flat paintings or as dimensional reliefs or sculptures. I'm pushing back against the myths that are still pervasive amongst us: colonial "discovery," Western dominance, progress, the dreams we're sold.
That pushing back is personal and also historical. I grew up watching a sun that was supposed to be fixed in the sky — a certainty, an authority, a given order. My work asks what happens when that sun begins to fall. Not just politically, not just in Venezuela or in the Americas, but in the deeper story of who gets to define what is beautiful, what is civilized, and what counts as art. I have never accepted those definitions. The jungle doesn't accept them either.
My story is one of reinvention, shaped by the many places I've called home. I've fused these cultural contradictions into one visual language in a place where different worlds meet and coexist.