Portrait to be displayed at Hempstead museum

be free of gun violence.” The vice president said that there had been 150 mass shootings in the first 104 days of the years.

“Gun violence is now the number one cause of death for children in our nation,” she said.

McHenry, a science teacher at Epic South High School in Ozone Park, Queens, and a minister at the Evangel Revival Community Church in Long Beach, is a noted artist in the city. Last summer, his work — focused primarily on figures from the civil rights era — was the first by a Black artist from the North Park section to be displayed in a solo show at the Long Beach Public Library.

In July, his portrait of Harris will be displayed at the African American Museum of Nassau County, in Hempstead. There are plans are for a celebration at the museum, to be attended by about 200 schoolchildren, McHenry said.

The portrait will also be displayed at the offices of the North Park Development Center, on Park Avenue, and later at the Roosevelt Public Library.

“I think his art is powerful,” Johanna Mathieson-Ellmer, executive director of Artists in Partnership in Long Beach, said. “It serves a purpose. It starts a con- versation, and conversations are good.”

McHenry, who attends weekly sessions at National Action Network headquarters in Manhattan, where there are lectures on civil rights and politics in America, said that some progress has been made on gun violence, but not nearly enough.

“People are galvanizing around the idea of some type of gun reform,”

McHenry said. He noted that two young Black Tennessee legislators, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, who were expelled from the Legislature after leading demonstrations calling for gun reform, had been returned to their seats.

But, he added, “It’s sad to say that the United States has never been safe. The founders thought there was a need to take up arms if the county felt threat- ened. But there need to be stipulations as to what kind of guns people can have.”

Those should not, he said, include assault rifles.