Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, Collage, Public art, Books and prints
Website: henryroark.com
Henry Roark is a San Francisco-based multidisciplinary artist and writer whose practice moves between painting, collage, paper sculpture, and small-press publishing. He studied Science, Technology and Society at Vassar College before spending nearly a decade in user-experience design roles at Google, and has since pursued graduate study in architecture at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen and an MA in Theology and Ethics at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. He is a Barry Goldwater Scholar (2011) and National Merit Scholar.
Roark’s painting practice began as a way to externalize the heightened, disjointed states of living with bipolar disorder, translating emotion into gestural brushwork and layered color and texture; his first solo showing, About a Feeling, was exhibited at Unit 809 in San Francisco in 2015. He later founded Weather Pattern Press, a small press producing hand-bound zines and made-to-order photobooks, and continues to work across origami-based public sculpture, collage, woodworking, and architecture-inflected design projects.
Roark is embedded in San Francisco’s civic and cultural life: he has served on the board of directors of the Roxie Theater since 2022, volunteers with 826 Valencia and Mission Graduates, and chairs diversity, equity, and inclusion programming for the Society of Friendly Architects (SOFA). He also holds a Certified Medi-Cal Peer Support Specialist credential and works as a peer mental-health support specialist.
Roark’s work is rooted in repetition, ritual, and participation. Senbazuru, an ongoing distributed installation, reimagines the Japanese practice of folding 1,000 origami cranes as a public sculptural project, with cranes made from fortune-cookie fortunes, washi paper, and family photographs installed as “beacons” at sites around San Francisco — including the public library and the SF Zen Center — tracked on a living map of their locations. His collage work layers found and personal material — vintage magazines, postcards, pressed flowers, family photographs — into dense compositions that address queerness, family, and place. Book Pass, a participatory literary project built around handing off books that “resonated,” and an annual “Oh, Henry! Prize” for his favorite books of the year, extend this same interest in circulation and shared authorship into the realm of reading.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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