• Mike Henderson:
    Chicken Fingers, 1976–1980

    January 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.

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    (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).

  • 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.

  • Mike Henderson The Yellow Pencil, 1979 Acrylic and mixed media on canvas 67 x 54 inches Sold
    Mike Henderson
    The Yellow Pencil, 1979
    Acrylic and mixed media on canvas
    67 x 54 inches
    Sold
  • Mike Henderson Chicken Fingers, 1980 Acrylic and mixed media on canvas 73 x 50 inches
    Mike Henderson
    Chicken Fingers, 1980
    Acrylic and mixed media on canvas
    73 x 50 inches

  • 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.

    • Mike Henderson Cloud Nine, 1977 Acrylic and mixed media on canvas 54 x 100 inches
      Mike Henderson
      Cloud Nine, 1977
      Acrylic and mixed media on canvas
      54 x 100 inches
      Price upon request
      Inquire

  • 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. 

  • 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.

  • MIKE HENDERSON, b. 1943, Marshall, MO | Lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area, CA

    MIKE HENDERSON

    b. 1943, Marshall, MO | Lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area, CA

    Mike Henderson is a pioneering African American artist, filmmaker and musician, whose dynamic practice has spanned more than fifty years. Recent exhibitions include his first museum retrospective, Before the Fire, 1965–1985 at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art (2023); Chicken Fingers, 1976–1980 at Haines Gallery (2023); Honest to Goodness at SFAI (2019); and the group exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963–1983 at the de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA (2019). His works have been collected by such institutions as the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA; Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis, CA; Oakland Museum of California, CA; Phoenix Art Museum, AZ; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY. Henderson has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1973), National Endowment for the Arts Artist Grants (1978, 1989), Artadia Award (2019), and the Margrit Mondavi Arts Medallion (2022), conferred by the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis.

    Explore more works by Mike Henderson

     

  • Installation views of Mike Henderson: Chicken Fingers, 1976–1980 at Haines Gallery, San Francisco; photos: Robert Divers Herrick