Sampada Aranke – författare

The first major exhibition and catalog dedicated to the work of groundbreaking painter and filmmaker Mike Henderson.  Mike Henderson (b. 1944) is a painter, filmmaker, and professor emeritus at University of California, Davis. Published to accompany his first museum retrospective, this catalog surveys Henderson’s paintings and films from 1965 to 1985, which are rooted as much in Francisco Goya’s horror of humanity as in Sun Ra’s hope for a new Black future. In the work of that time, Henderson depicted scenes of racial violence, heteromasculinity, and abject social conditions with force and unflinching directness.  In 1985, a studio fire damaged much of Henderson’s output from the previous two decades, obscuring vital ideas about a time of tumult and change, often referred to as a world on fire. Mike Henderson: Before the Fire, 1965–1985 addresses Henderson’s multifaceted art of that period, which examined and offered new ideas about Black life in the visual languages of protest, Afrofuturism, and surrealism.  Published in association with the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis  Exhibition dates:  Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of ArtJanuary 29–June 25, 2023

In Death’s Futurity Sampada Aranke examines the importance of representations of death to Black liberation. Aranke analyzes posters, photographs, journalism, and films that focus on the murders of Black Panther Party members Lil’ Bobby Hutton, Fred Hampton, and George Jackson to construct a visual history of the 1960s and 1970s Black Power era. She shows how Black radicals used these murders to engage in political action that imagined Black futurity from the position of death. Photographs of Hutton that appeared on flyers and posters called attention to the condition of his death while the 1971 documentary The Murder of Fred Hampton enabled the consideration of Hampton’s afterlife through visual meditations on his murder. Printmaking and political posters surrounding Jackson’s murder marked the transition from Black Power to the prison abolition movement in ways that highlighted the relationship between surveillance, policing, incarceration, and anti-Black violence. By foregrounding the photographed, collaged, filmed, and drawn Black body, Aranke demonstrates that corporeality and corpses are crucial to the efforts to shape visions of a Black future free from white supremacy.

In Death’s Futurity Sampada Aranke examines the importance of representations of death to Black liberation. Aranke analyzes posters, photographs, journalism, and films that focus on the murders of Black Panther Party members Lil’ Bobby Hutton, Fred Hampton, and George Jackson to construct a visual history of the 1960s and 1970s Black Power era. She shows how Black radicals used these murders to engage in political action that imagined Black futurity from the position of death. Photographs of Hutton that appeared on flyers and posters called attention to the condition of his death while the 1971 documentary The Murder of Fred Hampton enabled the consideration of Hampton’s afterlife through visual meditations on his murder. Printmaking and political posters surrounding Jackson’s murder marked the transition from Black Power to the prison abolition movement in ways that highlighted the relationship between surveillance, policing, incarceration, and anti-Black violence. By foregrounding the photographed, collaged, filmed, and drawn Black body, Aranke demonstrates that corporeality and corpses are crucial to the efforts to shape visions of a Black future free from white supremacy.