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Mike Henderson:
Chicken Fingers, 1976–1980January 14 – April 1, 2023
Haines Gallery proudly presents Chicken Fingers, 1976–1980, a solo exhibition by the acclaimed Bay Area artist, filmmaker, and blues musician Mike Henderson.
Chicken Fingers is Henderson’s fifteenth solo exhibition with the gallery, and showcases a selection of rarely seen abstract canvases from his early career, brought together for the first time since their creation in the late 1970s. The exhibition offers a revelatory look at an artist at the height of his creative powers, reflecting both Henderson’s personal journey and his place in the culture at large. -
Chicken Fingers highlights an important moment in Henderson’s creative evolution: He graduated from the San Francisco Arts Institute and began teaching at UC Davis 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 figurative, explicitly political paintings of the 1960s to begin experimenting with abstraction.
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Created from the mid-1970s, these canvases, which the artist calls his “space modules,” are ethereal, otherworldly dreamscapes entirely of his own imagining. Each is an enigmatic assemblage of forms, icons, and symbols, painted, burnt, or collaged onto the surface: musical notes and instruments, the hint of a landscape, the outline of an animal. Some references may be autobiographical or didactic — musical notes in Cloud Nine (1977) and spray-painted guitar in Chicken Fingers (1980) point to Henderson’s concurrent career as a blues musician, while the titular object in The Yellow Pencil (1979) refers to the adage “the pen is mightier than the sword.” Others such as Relay (1980), comprising painted, shaped, and burnt fabric and spatial renderings against a misty, pastel backdrop, are more inscrutable.
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Henderson’s compositions range from densely layered to sparse and restrained. The artist compares such works to novels and haikus respectively, reflecting his interest in Eastern art and philosophy — in particular, the Zen Buddhism that friends and colleagues were exploring at the time.
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Chicken Fingers includes a group of corresponding works on paper that use architectural forms to evoke interstitial spaces — arched doorways and balustrades opening onto multicolored skies. Fully realized artworks in their own right, these watercolor works offer a fascinating window into Henderson’s creative evolution.
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Installation views of Mike Henderson: Chicken Fingers, 1976–1980 at Haines Gallery, San Francisco; photos: Robert Divers Herrick
