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Krowswork
April 11 - April 11, 2015Info
480 23rd Street Oakland, CA 94612 Google Map »Reception
January 1, 2014 12:00 pm to 12:00 pm
Mike Henderson, Down Hear, 1972, 16mm film transferred to video, b&w, sound, 12 min.; © Mike Henderson
Down Hear: Conversation with Mike Henderson
Saturday, April 11, 2 p.m. Gallery hours: 1‒5 p.m. Join us for an informal conversation between Mike Henderson, renowned East Bay filmmaker, painter, and blues musician, and Tanya Zimbardo, assistant curator of media arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and Krowswork’s third guest resident of 2015. The program will include a screening Henderson’s 12-minute film "Down Hear" (1972, 16mm transferred to video, black-and-white, sound). This work powerfully contends with the story of slave ships through a charged performance by Henderson and his brother Raymond. The inspiration for the accompanying blues soundtrack came to Henderson after observing a police conflict with neighborhood kids in the projects across the street from his home in San Francisco’s North Beach. Henderson notes that he made the film with an audience of African American youth in mind, offering “a possibility for living with this ambiguity that life gives us, with the courage and understanding that we all could find an outlet for our hopes and dreams . . . what makes life worth living down here.” From 1970 to the mid-1980s, Henderson made more than two dozen solo and collaborative films with artists such as Robert Nelson and Michael Rudnick. Henderson’s short experimental films have recently been the subject of a major preservation project by the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles, led by Mark Toscano; Toscano also has curated a number of screenings of Henderson’s work, including a spotlight program last year at the Exploratorium, copresented by the Exploratorium’s Cinema Arts program, SF Cinematheque, Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), and Haines Gallery. Henderson’s moving-image work has been highlighted at such venues as Indiana University at Bloomington; Cinema Project, Portland; Los Angeles Film Forum at LA MOCA; Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; No Nothing Cinema; Canyon Cinema; San Francisco Art Institute; SFMOMA; Phoenix Art Museum; Crocker Art Museum; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Ann Arbor Film Festival, among others. Born in Marshall, Missouri, Henderson moved to California to attend the San Francisco Art Institute, the first racially integrated art school in the United States, where he received his BFA (1969) and MFA (1970). He was hired shortly thereafter to teach filmmaking at the University of California, Davis, where he currently is professor emeritus of the Fine Arts Department (he served as a professor there from 1970 to 2012). Henderson lives and works in San Leandro. Related: Mike Henderson's film "The Shape of Things" (1981) will be on view during the final weekend of Zimbardo's residency: First Friday, May 1, from 5 to 9 p.m., and Saturday, May 2, from 1 to 5 p.m. Exhibition on view in the adjacent gallery: "Versions: Kristin Lucas and Judy Malloy."