WILLIAM T. WILEY AT THE MASSIMODECARLO GALLERY, London, England.

JANUARY 16-FEBRUARY 17, 2024

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 MASSIMODECARLO is pleased to present Not Too Near, Not Too Far, a duo exhibition by the pioneering artists Mike Henderson and William T. Wiley, curated by Dr. Francesca Wilmott. Following an initial encounter at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) in 1970, the two artists shared interwoven artistic trajectories. During their fifty-year friendship, they collaborated in music and on films and exchanged ideas related to painting, politics, teaching, and philosophy.

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Embracing the experimental approach of the revered University of California, Davis art programme (Wiley taught at UC Davis from 1962 to 1973, and Henderson from 1970 to 2012), Henderson and Wiley freely used different materials and approaches to suit their needs. Both artists were sceptical of strict ideologies, preferring to forge individual artistic paths. Not Too Near, Not Too Far charts encounters and exchanges between them, particularly within each artist’s movements between figuration and abstraction. The exhibition’s title encapsulates their symbiotic but distinct artistic practices and is taken from Henderson’s 2017 painting of the same name.

 

Henderson was born in 1943 in Marshall, Missouri, in a town where Jim Crow laws continued to deny basic liberties to African American individuals. While he was growing up, Henderson was determined to ‘draw and write and play guitar’. He began displaying his paintings next to his shoe-shining stand at the local hotel and performing with his band, The Blues Men. ‘When I first heard blues, it was more than the sounds. The stories haunted me’, he recalls. Seeking greater personal and artistic freedoms, Henderson moved to California in 1965 and enrolled at SFAI, one of the few integrated art schools in the United States at the time.