Published to accompany Mike Henderson's first museum retrospective, Before the Fire, 1965-1985 surveys the artist's paintings and films from the first twenty years of his artistic career, which are rooted as much in Francisco Goya’s horror of humanity as in Sun Ra’s hope for a new Black future. In the work of that time, Henderson depicted scenes of racial violence, heteromasculinity, and abject social conditions with force and unflinching directness.
In 1985, a studio fire damaged much of Henderson’s output from the previous two decades, obscuring vital ideas about a time of tumult and change, often referred to as a world on fire. Before the Fire addresses Henderson’s multifaceted art of that period, which examined and offered new ideas about Black life in the visual languages of protest, Afrofuturism, and surrealism.
This catalog in association with the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis.
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