I did this drawing some time ago, probably in 2023.
I found the frame a few years ago and always knew I wanted to use it. I was lucky enough to have the image that was meant for it: Directions.
I think this piece talks about both time and distance. Arrow up, arrow to the right—either works.
It’s a fun little piece, and I’m ready to part with it.
Directions, c. 2023
Pen and ink
Drawing: 3½ × 2¼ inches
Framed: 4½ × 3¾ inches
$350 framed
I’ve been thinking about behavior.
Maybe it started with something I heard at Meeting this weekend about being slow to anger. The message was partly about animals and how uncomplicatedly they can love us. But my mind went somewhere else.
If you want to be loved, love.
If you want people to be kind to you, be kind.
If you want charity, show charity.
It sounds terribly simple. Maybe too simple. But I keep coming back to the idea that eventually it isn’t what we say about ourselves that matters. It’s how we behave.
Quakers don’t ask each other for résumés before we sit together in worship. We don’t list our accomplishments before standing to speak. At least we shouldn’t have to.
And yet I have a résumé.
I moved myself to New York when I was young and somehow built a life there. I finished my bachelor’s degree and figured out a way to do it for next to nothing. I ran a gallery in Midtown Manhattan and increased its sales. Later, Michael and I had our own business. Michael worked his tail off to help make it succeed.
Then HIV changed our lives.
We closed the business and moved back to Minnesota. Somehow, through that enormous transition, neither of us lost our medical insurance. That may not sound like much today, but at the time it was a feat.
I went back to work.
Eventually I found myself teaching full-time at Minneapolis College. I stayed for more than twenty years. I helped build a department. I earned my graduate degree while working another job to help pay for it.
Woo-hoo.
There. I gave you the résumé.
But none of that is really the point.
A résumé pulls together the pieces of a life. It’s simple Gestalt. You don’t see all the individual pieces anymore. You see the overall shape.
It makes a life look planned.
Mine wasn’t.
There were good decisions and bad ones. Things I worked hard for and things that happened almost by accident. Sometimes I succeeded. Sometimes I screwed up. Sometimes my own behavior probably made things harder than they needed to be.
That’s the life.
And maybe that brings me back to the message I heard at Meeting.
If you want love, love.
If you want kindness, be kind.
If you want charity, show charity.
Who I am isn’t my résumé.
Behavior tells that story.
In the end, which matters more—the résumé or how you live your life?
“I paint because the spirits whisper madly inside my head.” —Attributed to El Greco
When I was asked to do a show in Second Life, I decided to go back to an older body of work. I didn’t want to make a new show just for the sake of making something new. I wanted to look again at work that still had something to say to me.
Words I Cannot Spell started several years ago at Hunt & Gather, a wonderful old junk shop in Minneapolis. I saw a pile of letters stacked on top of one another. I stopped and looked at them.
I thought, that’s how I see words.
I started taking photographs.
But the photographs were too perfect. The camera knew exactly where every letter was supposed to be. I don’t always see them that way.
I began to have fun. I jumbled things up to more or less replicate what a page sometimes looks like to me—with a dash of anxiety and confusion thrown in.
That is what interested me about bringing these pieces back for the Second Life exhibition.
I was very appreciative of the opportunity to show this body of work again. The work is older, but the experience behind it is still very much a part of how I see.
Lately I have been doing a lot more writing—articles, agendas, reflections, and writing about my artwork. Maybe that’s why I found myself thinking about those letters again and about how I see words.
Showing this work again gave me another opportunity to give the viewer a little insight into how I experience the world through dyslexia.
Sometimes older artwork just needs another place and another time to speak.
August 28, 2026
The distance between Lake Harriet and Christopher Street is more than a thousand miles, but memory has a way of collapsing distance without warning.
Not so much about individual people this time, but about the set. That’s what it felt like as I started putting the pieces back together.
There was Allstate Art, where I worked. Kiss My Cookies. Hercules on the corner. The loft a couple doors down. Boots and Saddles. Clyde’s. A Clean Well-Lighted Place, a lovely little gallery.
There was Richard White’s jewelry store. I remember Richard and his lover sitting behind the counters, working side by side. It was a dark little place, nothing flashy.
At Bleecker and Christopher was an Asian fruit stand. There was Paul Bolardo’s place further down Christopher. Across from Kiss My Cookies was a little photography store in a basement.
Then there was the food. Chicken from Jefferson Market for dinner. Turkey legs from the deli. Zito’s Bakery. And Rocco’s, where my favorite was the creamolata. Wonderful.
There were lots of other places, of course. These are simply the ones that stayed with me.
Together they made up this little world where we worked, ate, went out, saw friends and ran into people we knew.
It was a community, but today I was remembering the place that held the community.
And somewhere in the background was Sylvester singing “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” probably drifting out of Boots and Saddles—also known as Bras and Girdles.
The drawing here isn’t Christopher Street. But somehow it feels right with these thoughts—pieces connected to pieces, the way memory sometimes works.
Today, for a little while, I could see the set again.
I wonder what part of it I’ll remember next.
— Bill Hendricks
Continue the conversation
For more photographs, stories, and memories of Christopher Street, visit this Facebook group.
I find myself reminiscing about the past more often these days.
I think about Christopher Street and the wonderful life that was lived there. I think about the friends I made, and the friends who became family, during one of the most intense periods in LGBTQ+ history—the AIDS epidemic.
So many of those friends are gone now.
But I still think about them. I remember them. And I think about the wonderful life I have had, and the life I am still having, and how much fun it would have been to share some of this life with them.
Maybe that has something to do with how Marsha P. came into being.
The drawing did not begin as Marsha P. Johnson.
I know that.
It began as a very abstract sort of image. I was working with shapes and lines without any intention of making a portrait.
Then I began to see something.
First I saw the smile.
At this point, I was exploring how to tint underneath the drawing—putting color down and then bringing areas back.
As I worked, I began to see the eyes.
And all along there was a certain joy in the drawing that kept coming through.
I continued drawing, painting, changing things, covering things, uncovering things. The more I worked, the more something from my own history seemed to be coming forward.
My past became present.
Marsha was part of the world I remember.
I don’t mean that Marsha and I were close friends. We weren’t.
She was someone who passed through my life.
But she was a character on Christopher Street, just as I was a character on Christopher Street—working in a gallery among lots of other characters I loved dearly.
There was something about seeing her emerge from this drawing that gave me a way of becoming involved with that world again.
Not simply remembering it.
Participating in it.
For a little while, the distance between then and now became smaller.
The finished work became Marsha P.
For me, it carries more than the image of one person. It carries something of Christopher Street, of friendship, of loss, of survival, and of the extraordinary joy that existed alongside some very difficult years.
Maybe that is why the joy in the drawing matters so much to me.
The work later traveled to New York, where it was exhibited during Pride Month. The original Marsha P. is now available through Collective Z Gallery on Artsy.
But when I look at it, that isn’t what I think about first.
I think about the people.
I think about the life we lived.
Sometimes, while making a drawing, the past finds its way back into the room.
Collective Z is currently presenting Second Nature, bringing together painters Gwen Yip and Spencer Patrick. Their work considers the spaces New Yorkers move through—from the public world of subway platforms to the private interiors where people retreat.
Second Nature is on view through August 29, 2026, at Collective Z, 325 Broome Street, New York.
