Kathleen Henderson at 18th Street, by Jessica Hough

Kathleen Henderson at 18th Street

By Jessica Hough

Kathleen Henderson in her studio at 18th Street Art Center in January 2021. Photo: Sean Meredith.

On January 6 when news alerts lit up our smartphones that rioters had breached the Capitol building, Kathleen Henderson’s studio at 18th Street Art Center was already crowded with goons. They had followed her, as they always do, and were taking shape on her easel and in drawings hanging four rows high.  

For close to twenty years, Henderson has been giving form to characters with a doughy human-like shape but vacant eyes and gruesome smiles. These blobby phantoms, rendered in oil stick on paper, inhabit corporate offices and take the stage at large events. They carry guns and stumble through forests meddling with wild animals. They limp along in a human-ish way but embody only our lesser qualities: narcissism, a mob mindset, and a blind appetite for power. Henserson’s surrogates expose these human qualities that spell our doom. “The problem is us. It's hard to solve,” she says during my visit.

 I’ve been following Henderson’s work for a dozen years, and on that January day when I clicked through to footage of a mob pushing through police barricades and saw photos of men clamoring through the broken windows of our Capitol, it seemed to me that Henderson’s drawings had finally come to life. Dressed in thick quilted coats and knit caps that softened the shapes of their bodies, carrying weapons and flags, and costumed in furs and horns, I saw the goons that Henderson has been cautioning us against.

Henderson jokingly refers to her time at 18th Street as her “doomsday residency”; first with Covid to contend with, followed by the attempted coup. The usual camaraderie of the Santa Monica studios was replaced during this time with an unsettling quiet that kept her frightened by the noise of the building settling at night, and the muffled voices of people passing on the sidewalk outside her studio. Many of us were paralyzed witnessing the Capitol siege, and Henderson too was initially struck into stillness. But she routinely makes work that operates in the space of doomsday. So in the end, her residency at 18th Street turned into a generative time. Working with news radio playing in the background, this latest crisis was telegraphed through her hand in drawing after drawing.

Unaccustomed to having long uninterrupted periods at her easel, she found herself reading and writing during much of the daytime. In the evening, when her ideas were stored up, even pent up in her mind, she released them to paper.  “So much of making art is like a transference of energy,” she tells me, and that energy needs to build. Henderson’s drawings are electrified by the jerky quality of her line work. It animates her characters, and delivers a discomforting tenor to the viewer.

The drawings look like they’ve been made quickly and they have, but her process is one where she makes drawing after drawing until she feels she’s gotten it right. She tears up the ones that she feels aren’t working. “I know when I don’t have it,” she says. Lifting the lid of a ream of paper she brought with her, only a few remain of the 100 sheets she started with. At home, her easel sits in a corner of her cramped bedroom with finished drawings going into a box under her bed with little possibility of being evaluated in the moment. The vast studio at 18th Street allowed her space to pin the works up, look at them in relation to each other, and consider them as she went. This was an indulgence that fed her productivity.

In one drawing, a massive blob man with saggy breasts rides along a parade route bolstered by the energy of the crowd. His naked form rises up from an open top vehicle; his mouth agape. But the dominant gesture is the stiffened arm pointing with violent accusation to someone in the crowd. It’s not hard to imagine who Henderson might be describing. These human stand-ins get their power, in part, from conspiring, whispering, gathering in groups. And in Henderson’s drawings, they appear to go unchallenged.

Some of the characters that took shape during her residency are reduced to an even simpler form--empty, oblong shmoos. Unclothed, they are turds or “shits” (which is how Henderson describes them). In one drawing, a parade float draped in festive bunting that you might expect to carry a small-town elected official and a handful of girl scouts is instead tightly packed with smiling turds. Parading, flag waving, (and pointing) runs through these new works; the superficial elements of leadership.

Henderson’s work uses satire but the critique is so broad as to encompass us all. Her drawings are funny but only for the split second they need to disarm you, before they burn and weigh on your conscience. We smile until we know that they’re about us. In another drawing, an armed turd ponders his reflection, easily reminding us of the selfies insurgents posted to social media to memorialize their violent invasion of the Capitol. The turd isn’t me, you think. But it is.

LA Times art review: Villain or victim? Comic or tragic? The unsettling art of Kathleen Henderson

Leah Ollman, Review: Villain or victim? Comic or tragic?
The unsettling art of Kathleen Henderson, LA Times, Jan. 2020

By LEAH OLLMAN
JAN. 14, 2020 7 AM PT

We aren’t beauties, we humans. At least not on the inside, not always. Kathleen Henderson practices an excruciating realism when it comes to our species. In 35 blistering recent drawings at Track 16, greed, pride and vanity play out in oil stick on paper — raw impulses matched by raw, urgent line.

Henderson, based in the Bay Area, hasn’t shown in L.A. for five years. Much has happened since then. In scene after tragicomic scene, Henderson registers the dismaying state of the union and the planet.

Two figures under an umbrella pose as if for a classic, nature-as-souvenir snapshot made comic by one woman’s awkward-sexy stance and made tragic by the green rain spit down from the clouds, the drops curdling into clots that litter the bare ground.

In “Team Building With Rabbits,” a man wears nothing below the waist, jacket and tie above, and on his face a dumb grin of self-congratulation over the carcasses clutched in each hand.

Henderson toggles astutely between representing concealment and revelation, power and vulnerability; sometimes the conditions oppose each other, sometimes they reinforce.

Most of her subjects, for instance, are hooded, their heads reduced to lumpy white domes with clumsily cut-out eyes and mouths. But those overly simplified features read also as unguarded, brutally transparent expressions. Henderson has referred to mummers’ costumes as a source of the hoods, but the cloth covering carries multiple and varied associations, from innocent Halloween ghost to devious criminal or torture victim. The drawings derive a distinctive, searing energy from that constant oscillation.

Henderson borrows not just from popular culture but also history and myth to render the tainted spirit of the here and now. A current favorite is the ancient Greek goddess Artemis of Ephesus, a protector of mothers, traditionally portrayed with a chest barnacled by breasts. Henderson shows her naked, onstage, before a curtain drawn as if of streaked blood — again, strength and vulnerability uneasily fused.

Many of the characters appear at microphones, engaging in some sort of public address, or posing with their conquests. Like good 21st century citizens, they are at once performing and exposing themselves, through the masking device of persona.

Are we doomed? Perhaps, perhaps not. But ridiculous creatures we most definitely are. Henderson allows for levity and also tenderness, even if skewed: A man kneels to kiss a dismayed ghost, outlined in red on the ground; the self-loving Narcissus is drawn as an earnest clown.

Henderson’s work might be pared down, but it is sociologically dense. Her palette of dilute pinks and greens verges on the sickly. Her line is insistent. Like the figures it circumscribes, it flaunts an innate lack of grace.

As with the mummers, her model too may be the Greek god Momus, who personified mockery and blame, exercising an essential role as social critic. According to one of Aesop’s fables, Momus faulted the design of the human body for hiding the heart inside. It should be visible, he felt, the better to detect its corruption. Henderson too believes in exposing humankind’s base motivations — exploitation, domination — and does so brilliantly, whether stripping her characters or cloaking them.

Kathleen Henderson
Where: Track 16, 1206 Maple Ave.. No. 1005, L.A.
When: Wednesdays-Saturdays; ends Feb. 1
Info: (310) 815-8080, track16.com

ArtNow LA art review: Kathleen Henderson: ‘Watch Me Make You Disappear’

Kathleen Henderson: ‘Watch Me Make You Disappear’
Expressing the Dire State of Our World
by Jody Zellen

Kathleen Henderson
Watch Me Make You Disappear
Track 16
January 4 – February 1, 2020

Kathleen Henderson has a facile hand and a keen wit. She mines the news media for content and rather than make didactic and preachy work about the state of the world, she offers humorous interpretations of these troubling times. Her oil stick and oil on paper works have a gestural urgency and her thick strokes suggest her characters, rather than render them realistically. In the past, the drawings were black oil-stick outlines on white paper but now her palette has expanded and many of the works have pink and green lines and shading, as well as brushed background tonalities. The latest drawings depict nude and hooded figures, animals, office spaces and political events with and without speakers. There are also images that suggest the unpredictability of nature and the changing climate.

Henderson’s deadpan titles make reference to the work’s content yet are often more metaphoric than specific. For example, Mushroom Cloud Party Hat Party (2019) pictures a smiling, multi-breasted Venus of Willendorf-esque figure in mid-jump in front of a stone wall and a distant urban landscape with a green-toned sky. Scrawled on the wall are the words: mushroom/cloud/party/hat./party. The who, what, when and why remain a mystery. This ambiguous figure also makes an appearance in Artemis of Ephesus on Stage (2019), as well as in many of Henderson’s out-takes, smaller (8 1/2 x 11 inch) works presented as a large grid in the back room of the gallery. Within this seductive and engaging presentation are crudely drawn prisoners, the devastation of hurricanes, masked men with guns, crowds, politicians, skeletons and oil rigs.

The cumulative effect of viewing these 150-plus works on paper is like mainlining a year of news, taking in the foils, destruction and ruin through a sigh of disbelief. In many ways, Henderson’s out-takes function as the index, opening possibilities for the creation of relationships and finding similarities between the larger and smaller works. Though not studies in the traditional sense, the out-takes represent the expansive nature of Henderson’s undertaking.

Henderson’s work speaks directly to the moment. She is not shy about expressing her political beliefs and pointing a finger at the absurdities within the current administration. While there are moments of reflection like in Kiss, where a figure leans over to kiss the ground or Narcissus in which a figure confronts his reflection, the overall effect of the exhibition is an expression of the dire state of our world.

See the article here.

— Jody Zellen is a Santa Monica-based artist and writer. She has been writing art reviews for more than 25 years and currently contributes to Artillery, ArtScene, Afterimage and Art and Cake. For more information on her art and writings please visit www.jodyzellen.com

Hyperallergic - ArtRx LA by Matt Stromberg October 14, 2014

Kathleen Henderson
When: Opens Saturday, October 18, 2014 5–7pm
Where: Rosamund Felsen Gallery (Bergamot Station B4, 2525 Michigan Avenue, Santa Monica)

Kathleen Henderson, “I Went There Looking For a Man Whom I Heard Lived By the Most Agreeable Occupation #1,” oil stick on paper (via rosamundfelsen.com)

Kathleen Henderson‘s oil-stick drawings crudely and colorfully convey a sense of contemporary alienation. Even when they are full of people, a sense of isolation prevails. Her latest body of work opening this Saturday at Rosamund Felsen “confronts head-on the financial sector and its place in a system of gross inequalities; the excess and waste of massively expensive and tragically useless trophy projects, or ‘white elephants’; and a profiteering pharmaceutical industry that is moving beyond marketing drugs to humans and setting their sights on neurotic and depressed domestic animals as well.”

Art in America

Kathleen Henderson
9/12/12
Rosamund Felsen
By Leah Ollman

The intensity of Kathleen Henderson’s line invests her drawings with a curious urgency. Nothing momentous or incendiary appears to be happening in the recent works—unlike previous examples, which conjure the physical and psychological dimensions of torture or the playing out of mythic struggles—but that urgency remains. Henderson draws in oilstick, usually black, pressing dense pigment onto the page, outlining figures with insistence and brevity. She seems to be channeling the impulses of both naïf and savant in these crude but incisive takes on human behavior.

Henderson’s scenarios generally take place against a stark background of blank white paper, interrupted only by the occasional dilute stain of gray or coral. Without contextual clues regarding place or time, the images read as universal, the characters within them acting on primal instincts. Many of the drawings here depict benign, common activities: wading in the sea, getting fitted by a dressmaker, doing backbend exercises, gathering around a fire. Henderson’s agitated line ratchets up the tension, as does her way of casting humans as awkward creatures, distilled to an animal essence. They rarely have necks or hair, so their forms look lumpen, unfinished. Eyes and mouths are reduced to irregular dots. The images amount to a chronicle of humanity, informed by observations, fables, fairy tales and the news.

Even the simplest of scenes can unspool a string of associations, many of them troubling. In Raincoats #1 and Raincoats #2, for instance, cloaked figures huddle together, not like ordinary pedestrians protecting themselves from the weather, but like an odd batch of captives. Their garments resemble burkas or, when the hoods are pointed, the hood worn by the prisoner in the indelible photo from Abu Ghraib or the costuming of the KKK. The raincoats, drawn in deceptively cheery blue, red, green and orange, fully enclose the characters like body bags, and they tilt and bump blindly into one another.

Throughout the recent work, the midcareer artist, based in Berkeley, Calif., sustains a tone of unpredictability. The situations she draws feel unstable, and individuals—often naked or mostly so—exude an anxious vulnerability. Prior work set that vulnerability within a scenario of the abuse of power. Here, it pervades the scenes like an atmospheric condition. Henderson’s work fits snugly, and wonderfully idiosyncratically, within the tradition of dark satire. In a series here based on Edward Hicks’s painting The Peaceable Kingdom, her pictures tweak the harmony by rendering it ambiguous, suggesting that coexistence between species is just as vexed as living among our imperfect genetic kin.

See the article here.

Photo: Kathleen Henderson: Untitled (dressmaker), 2011, oilstick on paper,18 by 241⁄4 inches; at Rosamund Felsen.

LA Times art review: Kathleen Henderson at Rosamund Felsen

By Leah Ollman, LA Times, June 25, 2010

Every show of Kathleen Henderson’s feels like a privileged glimpse into the artist’s dark diary. Or is it our culture’s diary? Or humankind’s in general? Henderson’s drawings are tough, brutal even, sometimes funny, almost always absurd. They are crude, raw, spare, ambiguous, and truer to life than the highest resolution photograph.

In her third show at Rosamund Felsen, Henderson fills the gallery with oil stick drawings and a small selection of tabletop sculptures fashioned of wax, paper, wire, paint and tar. There is much continuity between her new and earlier work, but also a bit of change — a firmer sense of place in some of the drawings, an expanded use of materials (more touches of color, and dilute tones complementing the linear forms, acting as off-register echoes or shadows). As ever, Henderson’s work has a searing immediacy. It seems simple — just a few characters, roughly outlined, on each sheet — but its implications and interpretations ripple outward indefinitely.

Verbal or visual threads tie some of the images to familiar events or subjects in the news. It’s hard to see any of Henderson’s hooded figures without recalling the disclosures about Abu Ghraib, and from there, thinking about torture in general, perpetrators, victims, anonymity and accountability. The phrase “Too Big to Fail” has become shorthand for any number of collapsible giants of industry. Henderson uses it to title a spot-on spoof of testosterone-driven hubris: a scene of four men in acrobatic balance, one standing on the ground and supporting the other three, perched on his thighs and shoulders. What stabilizes the whole? The central figure’s enormous penis, extending from his fly to the ground like the third leg of a tripod.

Phalluses make another appearance in the equally satirical “Small Celebrants and the Emergence of a New Poly-phallic God,” an image your imagination might be able to conjure, but only if you leave it open to both the outlandish and the mythic, for this new deity is not only multiply endowed in the region you’d expect but also shares a trait with Samson. His hair is an unusual source of strength. Yeah. Those aren’t dreadlocks.

ARTFORUM, critic’s picks

Sharon Mizota, Critic’s Pick, Artforum.com, Nov. 2008

LOS ANGELES
Kathleen Henderson
ROSAMUND FELSEN GALLERY
1923 S Santa Fe Ave #100
November 15–December 20, 2008

Kathleen Henderson’s exhibition of drawings and sculptures, titled “I Shew You a Mystery,” evokes the peculiarly American concoction of hope and fear, faith and desperation, that filled many nineteenth-century Christian revivalist meetings. Yet her spare, casual oil-stick drawings and lumpy, scatological sculptures are resolutely of the present, depicting a world still uncomfortable with itself: bellicose, juvenile, a bit confused, and often touchingly vulnerable. The drawings depict hooded figures (usually men) and cheeky satyrs in scenarios that are alternately ominous, tender, and darkly humorous. A man aims a rifle in front of a wooden shack; another is chained spread-eagle to a wheel. Other figures pray, hold hands, or waltz together awkwardly, and in one of the more bizarre examples, a dark-haired man helps a skinny hooded figure to direct his penis, which snakes out of his shorts like an umbilical cord, to the toilet. This mix of menace, comedy, and pathos is reminiscent of Philip Guston’s Klan paintings, but Henderson’s work is perhaps closer to the arch comic-book style of Raymond Pettibon, who shares her black sense of humor and eclectic, often outré subject matter.

Speaking of which, penises—both literal and symbolic—crop up throughout the show, signaling an irreverent fascination with the myths and pratfalls of manhood. This impression is reinforced by images of Pan, the horned Greek god, considered both a symbol of virility and a model for depictions of Satan. One paper-pulp-and-tar sculpture depicts Pan with a drooping phallus that isn’t nearly as long as his curling, rigid beard. This displacement of male potency undergirds the entire exhibition, revealing the misdirected masculinity at the heart of these chaotic, anxious times. The drawing Untitled (taping man), 2008, is a frighteningly succinct example: Two figures fasten a third to a board with strips of tape and hang him upside down. It’s a scene straight out of Jackass or, perhaps, Guantánamo Bay.

Read the article here.

NY Times, The listings, Aug. 14th, 2009, H. Cotter

KATHLEEN HENDERSON: 'WHAT IF I COULD DRAW A BIRD THAT COULD CHANGE THE WORLD?'
This beautiful and chilling show of oil stick drawings is like a fairy tale version of Abu Ghraib as drawn by Ben Shahn. Torture is in progress; Hitler tries his wings; men with bags for heads hunt animals but may be animals themselves; a fat bird flies by, trailing the words, ''If I could draw a bird that could change the world? In a good way, I mean. In a good way.'' The Drawing Center, the Drawing Room, 35 Wooster Street, SoHo, (212) 219-2166, drawingcenter.org; closes on Thursday. (Cotter)