Event Date
"Curating Black Rage and Black Utopias – Mike Henderson: Before the Fire, 1965-1985"
An exhibition opening January 2023 at the Manetti Shrem Museum, "Mike Henderson: Before the Fire, 1965-1985," will feature paintings and films by the UC Davis professor emeritus. These works depict scenes of antiblack violence, heteromasculinity and abject social conditions as well as utopic visions, questions of self-making and formal narrative studies of painting and film. Henderson’s ambidextrous practice examined and offered new ideas about Black life in the visual languages of protest, Afro-futurism and surrealism. These works, which resolutely challenge the protocols and propriety of art-making in the 20th century, are both formally and politically striking as well as reflective of a past not so far away from our historical present.
Sampada Aranke and Dan Nadel will provide an overview of the exhibition, with an emphasis on their research and collaboration as curators working within a university setting. They will contextualize the exhibition in relation to artistic biography and other relevant exhibitions in similar frames. In all of his work, Henderson gives us ways of imagining the pains and pleasures of Black life that remain relevant and useful to contemporary audiences. Aranke and Nadel will examine how these images necessitate an ethics of looking, a conceptual apparatus that they believe Henderson's practice makes possible. Viewing these works offers a means to understanding our own subjectivity and personhood in relation to the artwork.
Register here for the online talk.
Sampada Aranke is the second Scholar in Residence at the Manetti Shrem Museum and an assistant professor in the Department of Art History, Theory, Criticism at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago. Her work has been published in e-flux, Artforum and Art Journal. She has written catalogue essays for Sadie Barnette, Faith Ringgold, Kambui Olujimi, Rashid Johnson and Zachary Fabri. She is currently working on her book, Death’s Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power.
Dan Nadel is Curator at Large at the Manetti Shrem Museum. He is also the author and editor of several books, including Peter Saul: Professional Artist Correspondence, 1945–1976; The Collected Hairy Who Publications; Art Out of Time: Unknown Comic Visionaries, 1900–1969; and New York Review Comics’s Return to Romance: The Strange Love Stories of Ogden Whitney (with Frank Santoro). Nadel was the co-editor of The Comics Journal from 2011 through 2017, and has published essays and criticism in Art in America, The New York Review of Books and Artforum. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Image credit: Mike Henderson, Kingdom, 1971, mixed media on shaped canvas
Contact Email:clrubio@ucdavis.edu
Contact Phone #:530-754-9765
Event Type:Free Events, Lectures and Seminars
Presented by:Cultural Studies Graduate Group