Category: NYC

Returning to 51st Street

Returning to the former TR’s Gallery connected my first years in New York with my return as an exhibiting artist over forty years later.

Interior of the former TR’s Gallery space at 51st Street and Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, now converted into a brightly lit souvenir store filled with New York-themed T-shirts, mugs, gifts, and displays beneath a large “I ♥ NY” mural.
The former TR’s Gallery space today. The gallery where I managed Circle Fine Art’s TR’s Gallery in the mid-1980s is now a New York souvenir store. Walking inside, it was hard to imagine the walls once filled with original artwork instead of T-shirts, mugs, and postcards.

When I moved to New York in 1980, I knew exactly what I was looking for.

I was looking for a place where I could live openly as a gay man. I was looking for community. I was looking for a life where I didn’t have to explain or defend who I was. Like so many people before and after me, I came to New York searching for the freedom to become myself.

My first job was at Kiss My Cookies. Not long afterward, I went to work at All State Art on the corner of Christopher and Bleecker. From there I moved to TR’s Gallery, one of Circle Fine Art’s galleries, where I eventually became the manager.

This week I was back in New York because one of my drawings was included in The Ordinary, a group exhibition at Collective Z Gallery on the Lower East Side.

While walking through Midtown, I found myself standing in front of the building where TR’s Gallery used to be.

The gallery is gone. The ground floor is now a souvenir store. But the building is still there.

Standing there, I realized that I had come to New York searching then, and I had come back searching now.

The questions have changed.

At twenty-six, I was trying to figure out how to live.

At seventy-three, I’m trying to understand what that life has meant.

Maybe that’s one reason I’ve returned to making art.

The drawings aren’t simply images. They have become a way of looking back, asking questions, and seeing connections I couldn’t see while I was living them. More and more, the work feels autobiographical—not because it illustrates events from my life, but because every drawing carries something of the person who made it.

The gallery is gone.

The search isn’t.

Finding Benton in Michelangelo

The Council Episode of the Battle of Cascina, painted by Bastiano da Sangallo after Michelangelo Buonarroti. A densely packed group of muscular male figures twist, gesture, and struggle in a dynamic battle scene derived from Michelangelo's lost Battle of Cascina cartoon.
Bastiano (Aristotle) da Sangallo (1481–1551), The Council Episode of the Battle of Cascina, after Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1542. This painting preserves part of Michelangelo’s lost composition for the unfinished Battle of Cascina

Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975), Martha's Vineyard. Benton transformed the island landscape into a rhythmic composition of figures, movement, and place, reflecting his distinctive American Regionalist style.
Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975), Martha’s Vineyard.

I was at the Raphael exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I was not expecting much after being at the Vatican and in Rome and seeing so many of Raphael’s works in person. However, the show at the Met was a real eye-opener.

Not only did it present the history and the images, but it also showed Raphael’s education and the many works he studied and used as references for his own work. Specifically, I was enamored by his drawings. The drawings had real life.

What I realized is that as he tightened the renderings, the life gradually faded away. I know I am not in any position to critique Raphael’s work, but that was one of the most amazing things I took from the exhibition.

The other surprise was finding an image created by an artist copying Michelangelo’s work. When I saw it, it reminded me so much of Thomas Hart Benton: the energy, the rhythm, even the lighting and shading.

It revealed to me that Benton, too, must have been deeply drawn to Michelangelo’s frescoes and to the undulating, muscular compositions Michelangelo favored.

One of the things I enjoy most about museums is that you never know what is going to stay with you. I went to see Raphael. I left thinking about Michelangelo, Thomas Hart Benton, and the ways artists borrow from one another across generations. Sometimes the most memorable part of an exhibition is not what you came to see, but the unexpected connection you discover along the way.

“The drawings crackle with nervous energy, which gradually attenuates as Raphael translates spontaneous insights into the cool, lacquered surface of painting.”
— Financial Times

That observation captured exactly what I felt walking through the exhibition.

Christopher Street, West Village, 1980

A Drawing, a Beginning, and Finding a Home

Hand-drawn ink illustration of Christopher Street in the West Village, New York City, made in 1980 shortly after the artist moved to NYC, capturing storefronts and street life.
IMG_1712–What a Scandal-1980,  Artist: Bill Hendricks (Shadowmason)

I made this drawing in 1980, just after I moved to New York City.

I was a kid from Minneapolis — recently out of college, a couple of years into working — and I had come to a quiet but unavoidable realization: staying where I was would mean living part of my life in a closet, or keeping parts of myself hidden. I decided to check out both Chicago and New York to see where I might land.

Chicago felt hard to me.
New York felt open.

Within two weeks of arriving, I fell in love with the West Village. I went back to the Twin Cities only long enough to pack and was back in New York by Halloween. I found a roommate, found a job, lost a job, survived on unemployment — and like so many people before and after me, I found my community on Christopher Street.

This drawing came out of that moment.

I spent a lot of time at a small coffee shop called Kiss My Cookies. It was comfortable, cozy, and ahead of its time — cookies, brownies, coffee, small tables, and long conversations. I was there so often that Cy, the owner, offered me a job. I worked alongside Scott, Ralph, and Carlos, and two beat cops who stopped in regularly. Eventually, I wound up working at All State Art, a gallery just down the street.

Between the coffee shop, the gallery, and the block itself, Christopher Street became a cast of characters: Rollerena (sometimes called the Fairy Godmother), Marsha P. Johnson — often known as the saint of Christopher Street — along with actors, porn stars, artists, eccentrics, sweet misfits, a clown-college graduate, a lesbian manager, the joyful disaster of an owner’s brother, shopkeepers, cops, neighbors, and passersby. It was dysfunctional, funny, chaotic, kind, queer, deeply human.

This drawing isn’t meant to be a perfect architectural record. It’s an act of looking. The signs, the storefronts, the fire escapes, the rhythm of the street — all of it mattered to me. I was learning how to see a city not as a backdrop, but as a living system of people, labor, chance encounters, and survival.

When I look at it now, I sometimes think that stretch of Christopher Street was a sitcom waiting to be written. Not tragedy. Not trauma as the headline. Just life — community, chosen family, humor, tenderness, and endurance — long before anyone called it representation.

The paper has yellowed over time. I’ve chosen to leave it that way. It’s part of the object’s history, part of its truth.

This was home.

Thank you, the Whitney & Ming Smith

With art it’s cerebral, but there has to be a time to let go. In any craft, you learn the basics. And then you just go. An opera singer or jazz musician run scales all day and when it comes to performing they just sing or play. So photography was like that, you learn about lighting. You have the rudiments of the craft within you and then you just let it flow.

Ming Smith, member of the Kamoinge Workshop by way of an email from the Whitney Museum, NYC

Perfect timing! Just received an email from the Whitney, as I was examing the importance of intentionality. I believe it can be divided into at least two separate and distinct areas. Craft and knowledge of media and the artist\’s intention, whether it is to express an idea, story, subconscious muse, emotional outburst, an inner feeling.

My intention as an artist is evident. As clear as it was in grad school, a study of reality and perception… in short consciousness. Craft, on the other hand, I don’t know if an artist ever ceases to study the craft and technical aspects of producing art. I told a friend this morning that my retirement feels as if I have returned to college.

This semester has been a mixture of theory, dabbling and learning Blender, drawing, exploring the media I wish to use at this moment, learning more about color, and studying anatomy as taught by Loomis. I am seriously concerned about my grades this semester. LOL.

Two drawings created 2020
Left: the reverse side of the right side, Right: work in progress, 5″ x 5″, Hendricks©2020

Thank you, the Whitney & Ming Smith