Non Violence

Author
Nina Zurier

Decade

1960s 1970s

Activism Music
Black Panthers
Painting Vietnam
Racial Justice

“Non Violence depicts white cops breaking into houses and brutalizing Black people during the Civil Rights marches. When I started working on this painting, the cop had a gun in his hand, but I thought that this was too humane; a big knife was more primitive and brutal. The figure in the background has a head that resembles a pointed KKK hood. I wanted to portray KKK members as creatures, not people—to show how monstrous they are. Regarding the swastika and peace symbol affixed to the officer’s sleeve, I wanted to draw a parallel between what the cops were doing at that time and what the Nazis did to the Jews and others in Europe during WWII. Policemen may think they’re the ones fighting for peace, but peace is just a word that can be used by anybody. I was interested in that contradiction between ‘peace officers’ and their behavior.”

Wally Hedrick’s truck with protestors, including Mike Henderson, in the back, Market Street, 1967. Photo: © Lisa Law.

“The war in Vietnam was going on, you’d see the casualties: ninety-five percent African Americans. And you’d hear this stuff, when the Black Panthers would have a rally or a peace march, listening to these speeches, Eldridge Cleaver and so forth. Plus Sun Ra was hanging out at the school. [laughter] That, too. Everything’s different, you surrender to it and let it take you. Wally Hedrick, the registrar of the night school at the Art Institute, was also very politically involved; he’d get a truck and we’d all get in the back. We got the banner hanging on the truck and we would be playing music: ‘Stop the war in Vietnam, stop the war!’ A bunch of people would boo us and we would be like all the others, just getting louder. I never saw anybody else from the Art Institute there except some of the humanities teachers. But I also know that there’s different ways that people get involved with communities, and there were so many people at these things, I can’t say who wasn’t there or was there.”

Poster for a performance by Sun Ra at SFAI, December 14, 1968; artist unknown; SFAI archive.

Jay DeFeo and Mike Henderson at a graduation party, c. 1970. Photo: © Bill Arnold, SFAI alumnus.

“But I haven’t talked about two people that were very important when I was in the Art Institute: Joan Brown and Jay DeFeo. They were the only two women artists that were teaching night school at SFAI back then. I really feel that creativity has nothing to do with color, or sex or race or any of that stuff. Creativity is put into an individual and that individual has to have the courage to really surrender to that gift. At that time, people were saying ‘Black is Beautiful.’ And then came the question, is the artist Black or does the image have to be Black? There was this other compartment women artists I knew were dealing with—the blue chip artists in New York all were white males. So the first conversations I had with these women were about that; I wanted to know how they handled that. And they said, ‘Mike, paint. Just paint. Fuck the art world, just paint. Do what you do.’”