Using the phrase physical lyricism to describe his earlier work, John Richard Hersey, Jr is best known for his larger scale abstract paintings. Although his cast bronze and welded steel sculpture embodies much of the feeling of that period, his later paintings moved through figuration and back into a synthesis of both polarities. Throughout, he continued to explore his vision through drawing, etching and photography.

Hersey, Jr. was born in 1943 in New York City to China-born Pulitzer Prize author and journalist, John Hersey, and to North Carolinian, Francis Ann Cannon.

He practiced drawing under Victor de Pau in East Hampton, NY, and worked for a building contractor constructing houses before entering Yale University as an Art and Architecture major. During his undergraduate years, he worked for the architect John M. Johansen, A.I.A., for two consecutive summers; then in 1964 studied Drawing and Italian at Stanford University while working at a center for autistic children.

In 1965, following his BA degree from Yale, he entered the Yale Graduate School of Architecture while establishing a painting studio in a barn in New Haven. He studied Philosophy of Art and Painting at the University of California at Berkeley as well as traveling to Mexico and the Yucatan. At Yale Architecture School, his project House and Studio for a Sculptor was exhibited as Best of First Year. During this time, he studied photography with Walker Evans and exhibited works. In 1966 he attended an international conference of contemporary architectural theory in Delft, Holland, and again traveled throughout Europe. Following graduate school he worked as a draftsman for various architectural firms in New York City, most notably, once more, for John M. Johansen.

In 1970 he resided in Paris, France for a year and a half and in Rome (visiting the American Academy for three months) and on l’Isole d’Elba, Italia, before returning to New York City to establish a painting and photography studio in the newly emerging SoHo industrial district. In 1981, he purchased the house and studio of painter Norman Bluhm in Millbrook, New York and divided his time between his NYC and country studios.

From 1983 until 1988, he ran Gallery Hirondelle, in Soho, New York, representing a spectrum of contemporary local and international artists. He traveled to South Africa in 1990 to work with the Johannesburg Art Foundation and participate in the Thupelo workshop in Botswana and donated his sculpture to the National Museum of Art in Gaborone. In 1991, as Chairman of “Cast the Sleeping Elephant,” a project of the artist Mihail Simeonov, he assisted in funding (meeting with President Dr. Sam Nujoma to enlist Namibia as a donor nation) and creating a life-sized cast bronze bull elephant that was placed in the gardens of the United Nations in New York in 1998 as a symbol of all wildlife. Also in that year, Hersey, Jr. traveled with his son, Cannon, to China (Shanghai, on the Yangtze River to Chung Ching, Beijing and Tianjin) in search of the house where his father was born.

Other notable travels include projects in Sao Paulo, Brazil, for the exhibition On the Shoulders of Giants with Cannon Hersey and Samson Mnisi at Joaquim Esteve and for the Sao Paulo Biennal in 2008. 

Hersey, Jr. planned and constructed Haiku House, his last home, gallery and studio in 2005 in Millbrook, NY, where he lived until his passing on May 30th, 2018.