Mike
Henderson

Painter, professor, and blues man, Mike Henderson is little known for his remarkable body of 16mm film work. The Marshall, Missouri-born Henderson set out for California in 1965 to study at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he graduated with a BFA in painting and a MFA in filmmaking in 1970. He joined the faculty at University of California-Davis as a professor of art, teaching painting, drawing, and filmmaking until his retirement in 2012. Radically inventive, often hilariously funny, and very rarely shown, Henderson’s “talking blues films” reflect an unusual synthesis of his music and painting backgrounds, spanning compositional experiments, absurdist musings on creativity, and blues-driven pieces about Black identity, all rendered in a powerful, unadorned DIY directness.