Ron McHenry paints the vice president

Had it not been for the predictably nightmarish Long Island traffic, Long Beach artist Ron McHenry would have been standing side by side with Vice President Kamala Harris, along with a portrait he had painted of her, when Harris visited New York City on April 14.

But McHenry got tied up on the Long Island Expressway on his way to Manhattan for the annual convention of the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network at the Times Square Hotel.  There Harris spoke about the gun violence that is roiling America — and that touched Long Beach on Easter Sunday, when a 33-year-old father of two was gunned down in the Channel Park homes.

McHenry received a call from Sharpton’s organization three days before Harris was to appear, and he was asked to do a portrait of her. He said last week that he had never had to complete a project that quickly.

He regrets having missed the chance to meet the vice president. “I got caught in a long line of traffic,” McHenry said.

And as a result, Harris did not get to see the portrait, which depicts Harris with a sober expression, fit for a serious occasion. There is a slight smile on her face, but the overall impression, McHenry said, is one of apprehension.

“She is reflecting on all of the gun violence in America,” the 36-year-old artist said.

In her speech at the National Action Network convention, Harris noted that the country had observed the 55th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was shot on April 4, 1968, as he stood on a balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone to support a strike by sanitation workers.

Harris said the country faced “many important fights” — among them, “the fight for our children. And all the people to be free of gun violence.” The vice president said that there had been 150 mass shootings in the first 104 days of the year.

“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 conversation, 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 threatened. But there need to be stipulations as to what kind of guns people can have.”

Those should not, he said, include assault rifles.