About me
Mike Henderson is a pioneering African American artist, filmmaker and musician, whose dynamic practice has spanned more than fifty years. Born and raised in Marshall, Missouri, he moved to the Bay Area to attend the San Francisco Art Institute in 1965. His early, breakthrough figurative paintings from this period reveal the spirit of protest and social justice in 1960s San Francisco, as well as the vibrant community of artists and friends that would nourish his creativity for decades to come.
Henderson received his MFA from the SFAI in 1970, and soon left behind his figurative style, turning his artistic vision increasingly towards abstraction. Today, he is known for abstract, highly gestural paintings that demonstrate a palpable connection to post-war abstraction and a defining instinct for improvisation. Henderson’s lived experiences, conversations he has heard, and places he has visited — those moments that “stick to your retinas” — are all conjured up in his work through texture, form, and color.
Recent exhibitions include his first museum retrospective, Before the Fire, 1965–1985 at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art (2023); Honest to Goodness at SFAI (2019); and the group exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963–1983 at the de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA (2019). His works have been collected by such institutions as the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA; Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis, CA; Oakland Museum of California, CA; Phoenix Art Museum, AZ; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY.
In addition to painting, Henderson is an accomplished blues guitarist and filmmaker. His experimental short films have been screened at venues around the world, including recent presentations at the New York Film Festival, NY (2017); the Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago, IL (2016); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France (2016); Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge, MA (2017); and Academy Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2023). Henderson has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1973), National Endowment for the Arts Artist Grants (1978, 1989), Artadia Award (2019), and the Margrit Mondavi Arts Medallion (2022), conferred by the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis.
