From working on the after-hours cleaning crew at his San Francisco art school to becoming a globally celebrated and carefully studied artist, Mike Henderson has had a career that is almost as fascinating as his artwork. Henderson’s striking paintings, many with a critical focus on society, race, and culture, have hung in spots as varied as the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, to Harvey Milk Terminal 1 at the San Francisco International Airport. Join Alta Live as we welcome the Bay Area artist for a discussion on his extraordinary body of work and his first-ever retrospective, now showing at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art. You don’t want to miss this conversation with a seminal California artist.
About the guest:
Mike Henderson is a pioneering African American artist, filmmaker, and musician, whose dynamic practice has spanned more than 50 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 toward abstraction. Today, he is known for abstract, highly gestural paintings that demonstrate a palpable connection to postwar 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. In addition to painting, Henderson is an accomplished blues guitarist and filmmaker. His experimental short films have been screened at venues around the world.
Henderson has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1973), National Endowment for the Arts Artist Grants (1978, 1989), an 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. Recent exhibitions include his first museum retrospective, Before the Fire, 1965–1985, at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art (2023); Chicken Fingers, 1976–1980 at the Haines Gallery (January 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 in San Francisco (2019). His works have been collected by such institutions as the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis, the Oakland Museum of California, the Phoenix Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.•
