artist-IN-RESIDENCE
April 17 – May 1, 2025
Robbin Henderson
Robbin Légère Henderson is an artist and writer, whose practice focuses on graphic narratives centered in legacies of resistance. For years a painter of nature and landscape, after previously unknown family histories were discovered she returned to drawing. With a degree in English Literature from U.C. Berkeley and two years study at the San Francisco Art Institute, followed by years of writing as director and curator for community and artist-run galleries—San Francisco’s Southern Exposure and Intersection for the Arts and finally 20 years as director of the Berkeley Art Center–she began an exploration of graphic narrative to meld both skills.
The resulting book, Matilda Rabinowitz: Immigrant Girl, Radical Woman was published by Cornell University Press in 2017. She continues freelance curatorial projects for Bay Area Institutions, but is more dedicated to her current project: My Father’s Shadows: The FBI, God and the Depression, a graphic narrative based on her father’s oral history and FBI dossier. She is married to the artist Jos Sances, has two adult children and three grandchildren and lives and works in Berkeley California.
Artist Statement
I have begun work based on my father’s oral history and his FBI file that after years of seeking, I received some five years ago. I intend to continue this work while at the Good Hart Artist Residency: pencil drawings, scratchboard drawings and written text derived from the transcript of my father’s conversations about his life recorded by my brother, Dal. These conversations are augmented, with J. Edgar Hoover’s investigators’ reports. The long narrative will weave together the strands of my father’s oral history excerpts from his slender FBI dossier and my own memories of my father’s stories with my reflections on them. I will be working on fairly small scratchboard panels 5 x7 inches at the smallest and 16 x 20 inches at the largest. I will also be conducting research via the Internet to find historically accurate images and information to inform my drawings and narrative. I hope to engage with the local community by offering a workshop exploring graphic narrative through drawing and the scratchboard medium in collaboration with the Friendship Centers of Emmet County.
Community Engagement
