Mike Henderson

Roll Up Project is pleased to present paintings and works on paper by Mike Henderson. Since the 1960s, Henderson has been a fixture in the Bay Area art scene, deftly moving between visual and performing arts. His music, experimental films, paintings, and drawings reflect on daily life and the poetic moments that stay with us year after year.

In a 2023 interview in Alta Magazine, Henderson recalled encountering Roland Kirk playing the saxophone on the streets of San Francisco shortly after seeing him perform to sold-out crowds at the Fillmore in the late 1960s. Surprised to see such a powerhouse performer playing to nobody in particular, Henderson asked what he was doing. Kirk explained that he was “playing the sounds of the city.” This notion of being a conduit for the world around us resonated deeply with Henderson. The early 1990s paintings on view in the Harrison Street window exemplify this concept, drawing viewers in with striking colors and energetic abstract compositions.

Our experiences shape how we interpret abstract paintings, and Henderson is open to the possibilities beyond his own perception and intention. The viewer may divine fragments of information as they move around the canvas, such as a doorway or light through a window, but Henderson is primarily interested in the ways emotion can be transmitted through painting. Whether the subject matter is figurative or abstract, there is always the potential to move a viewer through color, tension, and composition.

The windows on Third Street feature six untitled works on paper from 1977. Spheres and lines traverse jewel-toned planes that could be interpreted as landscapes, architectural spaces, or states of mind. In each composition, Henderson uses light and shadow to suggest dimension, allowing both two-dimensional and three-dimensional spaces to exist in one environment. His watercolors are dappled and nuanced, bringing to mind the energetic textures of his paintings on canvas.

Viewed together, these paintings are spaces for contemplation, open to everyone as a refuge from today’s frenzied cycles.

About the Artist

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. 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 work is in the permanent collections of 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.

Learn more about Mike Henderson and his work at Haines Gallery.