Henderson acknowledges the influence of the January 6th insurrection on her current series, and much of her work depicts our brutality and insistence of passing on destructive traditions. Throughout the exhibit, her characters run amok, and hint at the growing radicalism that is infecting every aspect of our society, accumulating not just onlookers but active participants. Bluebearded figures, the personification of murdering misogynists, make multiple appearances including parading their way onto a school board, presumably to ban books and purge curricula. No image more directly addresses the characteristics of crowd mentality than Procession, which eerily mirrors the political pageantry of our former president and his minions on their march to disassemble democracy and establish an exclusionary society. 

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Many of Henderson’s drawings in the exhibition derive from her self-described “doomsday residency” at 18th Street Art Center in Santa Monica which bridged her experience not just during the pandemic, but also through the attempted coup. There, in her month-long solitude, Henderson drew on a daily basis, with news radio filling the space of her studio and imbuing her drawings with a sense of timeliness and urgency behind our societal collapse.

Henderson explains, “Facing the loss of the natural world, there is no time for despair. If you’re despairing, you need to get over it. I hope that these drawings address our singular ineptitude and the necessity to work together as a collective instead of as a collection of individuals.”

The urgency of her greasy lines and the palpable immediacy of her beings build scenes that disturb us with cutting humor. Experiencing her drawings is to hold hands with her while laughing and crying through the pinnacle of fright in a haunted house. Her cartoonish lampooning is a portal to engagement. Henderson remarks, “There's truth in line, there's truth in the details, and there's truth in scale. Tragedy is everywhere but to make it look like comedy, it stops the clock, and opens a small space allowing us to begin contemplating the unimaginable." As critical of her subjects as Henderson can be, there’s also universality – something of self-portraiture in them. We all have weakness, folly, and base desire.

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ABOUT THE ARTIST

Kathleen Henderson is a visual artist living and working in the Bay Area. Her work has been the subject of numerous solo shows in Los Angeles and San Francisco as well as the Drawing Center in New York. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant and is in the collections of the Hammer Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She has been a staff artist at Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland for over ten years.  She is the founding editor of the Creative Growth magazine, which showcases the unfolding and expanding world of art and disability. She is the executive director of Studio Route 29, a progressive art studio in Frenchtown, New Jersey slated to open Fall 2022.