Mel Henderson

American
(1922–2013)

Leather Wrapped Head
circa 1957

Leather, wood, and nails
22 x 23 x 11 in. (55.88 x 58.42 x 27.94 cm)
Gift of the Kathryn C. Wanlass Foundation
2011.66

This remarkable sculptural object, dating to the late 1950s, was only unearthed recently and brought a considerable amount of attention to its creator, Mel Henderson, a key member of the Bay Area beat-era art community. Henderson’s legacy has been undervalued, mostly because he gave up making these kinds of collectible, displayable artifacts in favor of witty, politically charged actions and land-art interventions.

A fighter pilot during World War II, Henderson took advantage of the GI Bill to attend the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) and Mills College, then immediately started teaching sculpture at San Francisco State. It was sometime during this period— accounts vary—that he began using found leather to make his dark but humorous constructions.

Technically Leather Wrapped Head is an assemblage, but its components are minimal: a brown leather jacket, a red leather something-or-other, and a completely encased, somewhat cubist wooden bust form. Other, presumably lost, works from this period include a series of found leather handbags, which Henderson filled with expanding polyurethane foam then closed up, allowing them to bulge and leak before solidifying.

While there’s something of the beatnik Frankenstein to this head, the prevailing impression is of a cool, fetishistic sadomasochism. Considered in the context of the oozing handbags, the head seems to speak about the containment (and possible release) of erotic energies, which, as we know from Wilhelm Reich, is the foundation of all politics.

Rooted in the surrealist objects of Man Ray and Meret Oppenheim, and presaging the psychosexual figurative sculpture of the late twentieth century and beyond, Henderson’s leather goods nevertheless seem most significant as an early expression of his later public engagements that addressed the plights of prison.

Doug Harvey

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This object was included in the following exhibitions:

• Collecting on the Edge Part I , 9/15/2018 - 12/15/2018
• Collecting on the Edge , 9/15/2018 - 5/4/2019
• Collecting on the Edge Part II Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art , 1/17/2019 - 5/4/2019

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