Mike Henderson believes in moving forward. Throughout his 50-plus years creating art, he’s been driven by what he calls “the great question: Why am I here?”
That purpose has also enabled him to work through devastating events, like the 1985 studio fire caused by a neighbor’s errant barbecue coal that decimated many of his groundbreaking protest paintings from the 1960s and ’70s.
The 80-year-old artist describes his first 20 years of work, which reflected the period’s cultural upheaval, as “a foundation I could stand on.” Much of that groundwork was “damaged somehow, either through the fire or rotted in storage,” he told The Chronicle via a video interview from his Oakland studio.
Decades later, his first solo exhibition in 20 years, titled “Mike Henderson: Before the Fire, 1965-1985” and on view through July 15 at Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, has prompted the painter to look back at that tumultuous time. Now he sees how certain events, the fire most of all, steered him in a new direction.
The installation “Mike Henderson: Before the Fire, 1965-1985” is on view through July 15 at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art.
Muzi Rowe
The installation “Mike Henderson: Before the Fire, 1965-1985” is on view through July 15 at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art.
Muzi Rowe
Above: The installation “Mike Henderson: Before the Fire, 1965-1985” is on view through July 15 at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art (photos courtesy Muzi Rowe). At top of story: Mike Henderson with Terry Allan (left) and William T. Wiley (right) at their three-person show at Cuesta College Art Gallery in San Luis Obispo in 1988.
“All of a sudden I start with a blank canvas again, and the material has to change because my life has changed,” he said.
“Mike Henderson: Before the Fire, 1965-1985”: Paintings. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday, Thursday and Friday; 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday-Sunday. Through July 15. Free. Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, 254 Old Davis Road, Davis. 530-752-8500. manettishremmuseum.ucdavis.edu
See More
Punctuated with his short films and blues music, which he’s played since the ’60s and continues to perform at Bay Area venues, the show features paintings that explore power and the radical Black politics of the ’60s and ’70s for a “profoundly moving and timely exhibition,” said Rachel Teagle, the museum’s founding director, in a statement. Some canvas edges are tattered and slightly scorched, either as a result of the 1985 blaze or from his own experimentation with the element, a practice that predated the accident.
The process to restore Henderson’s paintings began more than three years ago, a collaborative effort between Manetti Shrem’s curatorial team and the Oakland firm Preservation Arts. Through a process of “investigating the condition of paintings and developing treatment plans” like organic remediation, in-painting and re-stretching works, they were able to conserve 10 works for the monumental exhibition, said Robin Bernhard, director of collections and conservation at Preservation Arts.
The first room, themed “The Question of Violence,” drops the viewer into a turbulent flurry of racialized violence not dissimilar to our current moment. In the giant oil composition “Non-Violence,” the most visceral in the protest series, a white police officer brutalizes two Black people in their own home during the Civil Rights Movement era; off to the side, a ghoulish figure feasts on a human arm at the kitchen table. Though the painting is dark and pitched in shadows, its emotionally charged colors and kinetic impasto lend the image an unflinching clarity.
Mike Henderson, “Non-Violence,” 1967. © Mike Henderson.
© Mike Henderson
Mike Henderson, “Love it or Leave it, I Will Love it if You Leave it,” 1976. Mixed media, 69 × 108 in. © Mike Henderson.
© Mike Henderson
Top: “Non-Violence,” 1967. Above: “Love it or Leave it, I Will Love it if You Leave it,” 1976. Mixed media, 69 × 108 inches. © Mike Henderson
At the time, protests were a relatively new phenomenon for Henderson, who in 1965 moved from his quiet Missouri hometown of Marshall to the politically active streets of San Francisco. He attended the San Francisco Art Institute, the only desegregated art school at the time, and for years had a studio in North Beach.
“I was witnessing something I’d never seen before,” he said, describing a Black Panther rally he attended in the mid-’60s. “It was exciting to be in a group of people who felt that the world could be better. … I grew up, if you weren’t saluting the flag or something like that and into football and Jesus, then, you know, there’s something wrong with you.”
Facing civil rights issues through his art — painting the terror he witnessed and the taboos of the time — helped dissolve the knots in his stomach, he said: “Every artist that I sort of admired through history and time has addressed the two main issues: death and violence.” He cites van Gogh’s “The Potato Eaters” as inspiration, along with several other greats who addressed “human concern.”
Henderson explored other cultural concerns like women’s issues, but those works, he said, were rotted beyond repair in a long-dormant storage container. Years later, he chooses “not to look back,” he said, comparing it to the ritual of hanging a photo of a deceased loved one in a casket.
Still, he added, being forced to look back was cathartic.
“Doing this catalog for the show was very interesting, to allow the emotional things I would go through, reliving all of that,” he said. “I’m looking forward to seeing how that opened my eyes. It definitely shows you what a brief thing life is, when you look at your life, say, from the middle to the end.”
Mike Henderson, “Self Portrait,” 1966. Acrylic on canvas, 45 × 29 inches. Collection of John and Gina Wasson.
Mike Henderson
At Manetti Shrem, Henderson’s “Self Making” room is covered in self-portraits. Some are figurative, like the 1966 “Self Portrait” where a hat casts a shadow over closed eyes as he sings or shouts. Other, more opaque, pieces gesture toward a mutable inner life, like the cosmic shapes and dysmorphic images in “Trust” (1981) that coalesce into a collage resembling a memory or dream.
Other rooms play his films from the 1970s, shorts in which Henderson narrates in flare dungarees against a San Francisco skyline, or dances in a kitchen with a touch of verite. A section that depicts spiritual motifs questions how power appears in biblical tales, sometimes reconfiguring them with his own subversive storytelling. The final room corrals the viewer into a soothing space that plays the artist’s blues music. A message on the wall encourages you to release and decompress through journaling or discussion after the intensity of the exhibition.
Reflecting on his work, Henderson has a way of connecting each creative stage with a particular phase of life. The fire was one reason for his shift away from protest paintings toward abstraction, but there was also his divestment in figurative work and the deliberate choices it requires. “After a while there, there was no more,” he said, regarding the protest motif. “I felt like I was repeating myself.”
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate
1of13
From Mike Henderson’s “Pitchfork and the Devil,” 1979, color and black and white 16mm film, running time 15 minutes.
Provided by Mike Henderson
2of13
Mike Henderson with his paintings at the San Francisco Art Institute in the 1970s.
George Auxier/Provided by Mike Henderson / Haines Gallery
3of13
Mike Henderson with SFAI students and faculty on Wally Hedrick’s truck at a Vietnam war protest on Market Street in the late 1960s.
Provided by Mike Henderson / Haines Gallery
4of13
Mike Henderson makes his first 16mm film, “The Last Supper,” at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco around 1969. He had purchased the camera with the settlement from getting hit by a truck while catching a cable car on Market Street to the San Francisco Art Institute.
Provided by Mike Henderson / Haines Gallery
5of13
Mike Henderson at his San Francisco Arts Institute graduation in 1970.
Bill Arnold/Provided by Mike Henderson / Haines Gallery
6of13
A self-portrait taken by Mike Henderson in Bern, Switzerland, on the 1985 day a fire broke out in his studio. Henderson said he took the photo in disbelief at the news.
Provided by Mike Henderson / Haines Gallery
7of13
The Bluesmen, Mike Henderson’s first band, in Marshall, Mo.: John Nicholas (left, in blue); brother Ray Henderson, vocals; Billy Joe Kramer on drums; Sue, the lead singer; Galen Swift, whom Henderson taught to play guitar; and Henderson with his new red guitar.
Provided by Mike Henderson / Haines Gallery
8of13
Mike Henderson at his studio at the West Coast Macaroni Factory in East Oakland in 1987.
Wayne Woods/Provided by Mike Henderson Haines Gallery
9of13
Mike Henderson with an early painting, at the home of Sandy Smith in Marshall, Mo. Smith provided a space for Henderson to hang his work; she also owned blues records that Henderson listened to. “This was when I was first turning out to be a surrealist painter,” Henderson says.
Provided by Mike Henderson / Haines Gallery
10of13
Mike Henderson (right) with Carlos Santana (left) and John Lee Hooker at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco in 1989. Henderson was the opening act for Hooker’s performance.
Provided by Mike Henderson / Haines Gallery
11of13
Mike Henderson at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Madison, Maine, in 1968. He received a summer scholarship to attend the artists residency.
Photo courtesy Mike Henderson and Haines Gallery/Provided by Mike Henderson / Haines Gallery
12of13
Mike Henderson making his first 16mm film, “The Last Supper,” at San Francisco’s Baker Beach in 1969.
Provided by Mike Henderson / Haines Gallery
13of13
Mike Henderson performs at the San Francisco Blues Festival at McLaren Park in 1976.
Provided by Mike Henderson / Haines Gallery
His mediums and materials, too, have evolved. He likens his chosen medium of oil paint to having a favorite instrument — for him, the guitar. His environment in the ’70s dictated a move to experimentation with acrylic. That, he said, sometimes felt like trying the drums, which he would have liked to play but made him feel like he “had two left feet.”
Changes in studio space forced changes in thinking. “Not having the big workspace that we did when we were going to school, the luxury of it all, all of a sudden you’ve got to deal with storage,” he said. “So the work changed.”
When the fire occurred in October 1985, Henderson was out of the country on a three-month tour in Europe. He wasn’t able to jet back and deal with it immediately because of the financial investment in the tour.
Once he returned to San Francisco, he moved to a less expensive artist warehouse in Oakland. His East Bay studio faced a back alley where new sounds — a church choir, songbirds, different languages — and views stimulated his senses. He immediately returned to oil and also accepted a full-time position at UC Davis, where he taught painting, filmmaking and printmaking for 43 years before retiring in 2012.
Mike Henderson pictured in his backyard garden in San Leandro.
Samantha Laurey/Special to The Chronicle
“Eventually I realized the advantages of that,” he said. “Whatever the fire, the door it closed, it opened up another one.”
Life’s hedges and occasional flare-ups may be out of his control, the artist has learned, but one thing he can count on is the journey, and his desire to keep moving forward. He points to a book, “Beginner’s Mind, Zen Mind,” gifted to him by a fellow artist. “There was a passage, and it said: ‘Don’t worry about where the tracks are going, just enjoy the ride.’ ”
Reach Vanessa Labi: vanessa.labi@sfchronicle.com
