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Counter Histories

@counter.histories

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Counter Histories: Mapping, Making, Recovering and Reviewing.

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Praise Day for David Henderson organised by his daughter Najuma at St Mark’s Church, NYC, September 19th, 2026 at 4pm. Celebrating a beautiful soul who remains very much alive in our hearts. Live in perfect peace dearest friend. by @counter.histories

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a month ago

Vodka + Afro-dada Birthday girl!
The gentlemen jazz musicians @victordeyjr @frankkissi @bernardgamaayisa @gaddielamoah @elvisblack__ and company made my birthday @233jazzbarandgrill so fantastic, silly and hilarious! Did not realise I was being recorded.. lol. I love you guys! ❤️🙏🏾#Grateful!

Please scroll to see these guys jamming without moi hijacking the mike in the name of all things surreal!

PS, if you are interested - I am mangling Victor Dey Jr’s exquisite composition “2am lullabye”. by @counter.histories

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2 months ago

David Henderson, 1942 – 2026. Poet, activist, friend and eternal inspiration to a community of New York underground radicals.

David did a lot. Amongst his lesser achievements; he wrote and recorded the lyrics for Sun Ra’s “Love in Outer Space”, performed poetry on Ornette Coleman’s “Science Fiction” album, collaborated with David Murray, Butch Morris and many jazz greats.

A founding member of the Black Arts Movement and Umbra, his seminal book on Jimi Hendrix, “Scuse Me While I kiss the Sky” (1978), (1981), gives weight to forgotten arguments for the engineered dissolution of the Black Liberation Movement, his poetry anthologies “De Mayor of Harlem” (1970) and “Neo- California” (1998) underscore his profound range. He taught his entire life, at universities like Berkeley, Columbia, The New School and City College of New York to name but a few.

David is a bedrock of my artistic identity, we met in 1997 backstage at a Black Rock Coalition performance, as we were both friends with Vernon Reid and Greg Tate. He took me to demonstrations in Harlem, vegan restaurants across the city, poetry and art readings and introduced me to a radical world of anti-capitalist black intelligentsia and their multi-racial allies. We hung out with a lot of foundational 70’s punks, poets and free spirits… the kind of people who were always threatening to “move to Canada if things get any worse”.

A true radical activist, he was wary of the digital world. His presence is lighter than someone of his immense importance should have. Two of my historic artworks were made for him. I write to honor his memory and underscore his place in time and space.

He is a soul who gave us radical truth, poetry and love everlasting.

Sunrise
Love everlasting
Reaches out
To a lover like me again
Sunrise and love, love, love, everlasting

Sunrise
Love in its splendor
Speaks to me
In metaphysical harmony
We move
In love in its majesty
Ever upward
To delight in the mystery

David Henderson, - opening lines to Sun Ra’s “Love in Outer Space”.

My deepest condolences to David’s family and close friends. May he rest in Perfect Peace.

Photo: David in I at my opening at Skirt Space on Mercer in 1999. by @counter.histories

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5 months ago

Art… recent musings January - Spring 2026.

Don’t sabotage me cause I write and think… Can’t state this enough! 😇 by @counter.histories

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5 months ago

Darlings! I’m in the top 5 authors for Birkbeck College most downloaded theses!

This is for the 22 people who liked my last related post on the metadata. 🫠🙏❤️

Can someone please give me a cushy post-doc and a publishing deal?

I held back some great material and graduated in 2022… and I don’t think I have the strength to write a grant application.

PS, I’m dyslexic for punctuation.

#humblebrag by @counter.histories

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5 months ago

Bots? 500+ people a month downloading my thesis? Yes, I’m procrastinating on a deadline…

But seriously, the metadata says ChatGPT only hit me 3 times.., Google chrome 1000+ . 6777 downloads ? Is this AI? Asking for a friend… I’m mainly an artist people, don’t go sabotaging my career with this post! by @counter.histories

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7 months ago

“Regeneration and the Regulation of Emotion”. My new essay on sound, war trauma, neuroscience, music and healing for @redcrossmuseum.ch and @epflpress book of the exhibition “Tuning In: Acoustics of Emotion, Sound Archives and Contemporary Aesthetics”. Curated and edited by the brilliant Elisa Rusca, a deeply moving project with powerful resonance. I am honored to contribute.

It is with a heavy heart that I review last summer’s predictions of an increase in bombing, global violence and the difficulty of healing in the absence of community and love. “If we cannot harness sound for peace, let us at least anticipate our need to heal the damage caused by sound and prepare the mechanisms for recovery”.

Reviewing Nigel Osbourne’s work on music, neuroscience, trauma and a 1931 essay stating Black American soldiers saved Europe from war trauma with jazz; I hope that belief, funding and investment in the culture, science and social mechanisms of healing returns to art. by @counter.histories

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7 months ago

My work Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (2003-2006), inspired by French philosophers Deleuze and Guittari’s “Mille Plateaux” (1980); made using the actual library of a con artist chased out of a Swiss town by INTERPOL.

200 self-help buisness books was a sign of madness back then… now? The Fribourg police gave me permission to use several items from a crime scene for this piece made in collaboration with @kunsthallefriartfribourg and then Director Sarah Zuercher @sarah_zurcher . Thrilled to find it par hasard in @archdigest’s new feature on dear friend and amazing collector Rodney Miller’s @leancook stunning new home, designed by @merrittchase with national treasure Franklin Sirmans @franklinsirmans curating the artworks.

I love that anyone could live with this work, which is also inspired by Michael Taussig’s The Devil and Commodity Fetishism (1980) which introduced the idea of money in capitalist society becoming a “phantom object”. This is pre-bit coin and financial crises.

For a decade I was invited to show this expanding installation at public instutions worldwide. Senegal sent a rep from the ministry of finance to interview me. When markets collapsed, every artist talk became a town hall meeting. Book covers were stolen every time I showed the piece! Steven Nelson @snelsonus wrote a lovely piece featuring this work when I represented the USA and Diaspora for the 2006 Dakar Bienalle.

Hannes Famira @famirafonts worked on the intense design of this work with me, these are photos of books, - subtle gradations in colour saturations and tears and wrinkles appear in the covers. Note the ubiquitous orange tan…

This post made me realise that 1980 was a great year for critical writing, I was 8, must have absorbed this osmotically while hanging out at U of C when my brothers were at Lab School and my mom and Aunt Nancy were teaching there too!

Installations featured are;
Rodney Miller’s home
The Dakar Bienalle, IFAN museum 2006
Friart Kunsthalle Fribourg 2003

Not featured but also showed versions of this work;
Kunstraum Lakeside Klagenfurt
Stedelijk Museum Bureau (SMBA)

Capitalism and Schizophrenia
approx.250cm x 125cm, print edition 1/25. by @counter.histories

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7 months ago

Cheesy photo and post: All shipping, production, publication costs are born by me personally for all my shows - unless with a big museum, when I still may pay a portion of production myself or seek funding through patrons. (Thank you people, you know who you are). Get in touch with me directly or ask for my contact. I am famous for being careful my work goes to people who work in public service or arts philanthropy. I like to feel out collectors and their energy so if you are not talking to me directly, please ask why.

#senamokudzeto by @counter.histories

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8 months ago

Studio exhibition at Senam @counter.histories in Basel with many interesting new works! by @counter.histories

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8 months ago

Ronnie Krensel, producer, filmmaker, journalist (my former roommate and once nyc best friend), left after a long and miraculous battle with brain cancer on October 20th, 2025. Diagnosed as Covid began, he beat incredible odds with the help of a group of dedicated friends who fought to fund his treatment.

I was not a part of his first round of carers having fallen out with Ronnie in the early 2000s (over a bizarre phase of deliberate street brawling, in contrast to his deeper personality as a truthful, caring soul with high moral standards and generous heart).

I don’t normally do posts relating to the deaths of friends, but I feel many 9-11 related deaths are being missed, because trauma removes all perspective.

Two years ago I suddenly had a flash that Ronnie’s brain cancer was almost 100% caused by inhaling debris during 9-11 in the Twin Tower attacks. Everyone, including he (!) forgot that he volunteered and got certification from the fire department to film the first responders on the pile for 3 weeks. In addition, his flat on King Street was located in the dust cloud that hung over us in lower Manhattan for months, - the area now designated as ‘the disaster zone’. I put Ronnie in touch with lawyers and the World Trade Center compensation fund immediately, but it was slow and not enough to save him or guarantee the future of the daughter he loved so much.

I met Ronnie in London in 1993 and we worked together on a snowboarding TV show for Channel 4. When I moved to NY circa ‘97, he and his girlfriend hosted me in his King street apartment for years rent free. Ostensibly in exchange for cooking macrobiotic meals, but really, he was an early art patron and supporter who protected me from the harsher realities of being a homeless artist in New York.

One Halloween I came home and he was dressed in all my African cloth and Jewellry including head tie. I said ‘what is this?!’.. he said “I’m Erick Badu”… I fell over laughing. We went out all night.

Contact sheet photos are from 1999 when Ronnie and @angieparkerbeauty helped organise my first NY solo show in a loft on Mercer. Thanks for taking care of him and Poppy babes. Rest in Peace RK. 🙏❤️💔 by @counter.histories

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a year ago

Peace Out (2025). A new acrylic ink on paper work I made for the alumni SMH @studiomuseum exhibit showcasing the new artist’s studios. The printed roster of old friends and colleagues on the wall is touching, so many important and distinct voices have come through the AIR program, but in places to see your name listed next to close friends gone too soon is very sad…

We lost Michael Richards in the Twin Towers during 9-11. With great sadness only this week, I found out his ex-girlfriend, my close friend Kira Lynn Harris is gone too. We three became friends as that rare and special entity, — Black Whitney ISP alumni. I remember the distraught weeks she and Moukhtar Kocache of LMCC spent desperately searching New York’s hospitals looking for Michael’s body. My residency at SMH ended just after 9-11 in September, 2001, I just remembered cycling through the dust up the West side highway to my studio and having horrible asthma for weeks afterwards, unable to breathe.

I lived downtown in the ‘disaster area’ in the months before and after the strikes and bumped into Kira often checking lists for those found during this awful time. I was diagnosed with sarcoidosis in 2008. Someone should take a tally of artists who lived and worked in Lower Manhattan during 9-11, see how many of us are left, and how many of us have suffered related sicknesses and mystery health disorders. There is a collective amnesia over what we endured.

Ending this post with Emory Douglas “Power to the People” because that is what this is all about.

#kiralynnharris
#michaelrichards
#michaelrichardsart
#senamokudzeto
#studiomuseuminharlem by @counter.histories

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a year ago