I’ve been following Cj Hendry’s work since 2013, when she was drawing in black and white pen with painstaking precision. Back then, her focus was on surface and detail. Over the years, I’ve watched Hendry push her practice outward, moving from colored pencils into immersive experiences that swallow you whole, each new project less about the object itself and more about how we engage with it. Her latest project, in collaboration with Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams, continues that evolution. An edible artwork called OPAQUE, both a limited-edition ice cream and a pop-up installation in New York City, challenges one of the most ingrained assumptions about ice cream: that it should be colorful.
Ice cream has always been a visual medium as much as a gustatory one: pastel scoops stacked high, rainbow sprinkles, neon pints lining freezer cases. Instead of pastels or sprinkles, OPAQUE arrives jet black. Made with cocoa, espresso fudge, and balsamic cherry, the flavor asks people to taste without visual cues. The familiar sweetness and richness are there, but hidden inside a form that looks more severe than playful. That shift forces a different kind of awareness, one that aligns with Hendry’s larger body of work.
This, of course, is what Hendry does best—manipulating context, transforming the familiar into something uncanny and new. Just as her hyper-realistic drawings once made us reconsider a crumpled Hermès bag or a handful of candy wrappers, here she asks us to reconsider ice cream — an object so ingrained in memory and culture — by making the ordinary suddenly unfamiliar.
For three days, Hendry and Jeni’s hosted a monochrome ice cream shop in SoHo, where everything from the waffle cones to the walls was sable black. Inside, Hendry showcased seven new works created for the project, each playing with the same chromatic void, continuing her interest in how context changes our relationship to consumption. It’s a stripped-down environment, one that highlights texture, form, and sensation over spectacle. Not silence exactly, but a removal of noise, a design gesture that amplifies sensation rather than diminishes it.
Beth Stallings, Jeni’s director of innovation, calls the flavor “layers deep…an excavation of flavor,” a sentiment that could easily apply to Hendry’s artistic philosophy. Jeni’s, long known for bringing painterly approaches to ice cream, seems the perfect collaborator for an artist whose practice is rooted in translating consumption into experience. Together, they’ve reframed a product launch as a sensorial performance.
Hendry has long been interested in consumer culture, not in the cynical sense of critique, but in the earnest act of noticing. With OPAQUE, she’s asking us to slow down and reconsider the transactions we rarely question. Ice cream, perhaps the most democratic of indulgences, becomes something more than a treat, an observation of how much of the experience is bound up in what we expect to see. By removing color, the collaboration makes the familiar feel new again.
We wanted to create an experience that pushes sensory boundaries. Removing color makes you feel everything else more deeply—the texture, the taste, the emotion.
Cj Hendry
In a world oversaturated with image and spectacle, Hendry and Jeni’s created something startling in its restraint. Not about absence, but rather about presence, OPAQUE encourages the presence of taste, of touch, of attention. A jet-black scoop that reminds us that sometimes, the less we see, the more we feel.
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