Protest Paintings

In 1965, celebrated artist and blues musician Mike Henderson moved from a rural farming community in the Midwest to attend the San Francisco Art Institute. Galvanized by an atmosphere of protest and possibility, the young artist set to work producing a breakthrough series of large-scale, figurative paintings—many of them overtly political. “The Vietnam War was going on, and the Civil Rights Movement, and the Haight. So I did these huge protest paintings of Blacks fighting back against the system,” Henderson recalls.

Works from this series were included in two important exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art: Human Concern / Personal Torment: The Grotesque in American Art (1969) and Contemporary Black Artists in America (1971). These shows brought Henderson’s early works into dialogue with a range of artists concerned with violence and social justice, from Leon Golub to Robert Colescott. Now, nearly 50 years later, Henderson’s Protest Paintings and early abstract works are finding renewed relevance.

Space Modules

Henderson received his MFA degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1970, a year that marked a dramatic change in the form and content of his work. Like many artists searching for new modes of expression following the tumult of the previous decade, Henderson left behind his explicitly political paintings of the 1960s to begin experimenting with abstraction.

The large, abstract mixed-media pieces that followed recall Salvador Dalí’s surrealist dreamscapes and the works of Yves Tanguy. Writing in the journal Black Camera, Mark Hain and Michael T. Martin note: “Henderson refers to the works from this period as ‘space modules.’ Amid the colors and shapes making up what seem to be alien landscapes, fragments almost coalesce into recognizable images—a face, a figure, an animal, musical symbols, letters—but then retreat back into their compelling mysteriousness.”

About the Artist