Haines Gallery presents Mike Henderson: Truth, Love & Curiosity, the gallery’s 16th solo exhibition with the pioneering San Francisco Bay Area painter, musician, and filmmaker, at Fort Mason Center For Arts & Culture. Truth, Love & Curiosity features a series of new abstract canvases.

Truth, Love & Curiosity is on view at the Haines Gallery in Building C from September 11, 2025 through October 25, 2025, Tuesday through Saturday, 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. The opening reception takes place on Thursday, September 11, 2025, 5:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., followed by a live blues performance by Mike Henderson & Cabin Fever, 7:30 p.m. to 8:15 p.m. in The Store House, Landmark Building D, First Floor.

Henderson is a San Francisco Bay Area visual artist, musician, and filmmaker. Born in Marshall, MO in 1943, Henderson has been an important figure in the Northern California art scene since the 1960s. Now in his 80s, the artist continues to create works that surprise and challenge expectations. Named after the impulses that fuel Henderson’s fearlessly inventive practice, Truth, Love, and Curiosity features his gestural, highly tactile oil paintings alongside a selection of his early experimental films.

Rather than working from preconceived plans or notions, Henderson’s paintings are guided by an openness and responsiveness to the medium’s potential. As the artist explains, “Each brush stroke opens up so many new ways of seeing, working, and thinking.” Henderson uses a brush, palette knife, and even his fingers to push, pull, and scrape paint across the canvas, working and reworking each surface repeatedly as he builds layers of textural and chromatic detail. The resulting works are visually complex, materially dense, and pulsating with energy.

Truth, Love, and Curiosity focuses on a series of large-scale paintings that Henderson began in 2023. Articulating his uninhibited approach to mark-making, color, and composition, these new works are varied and singular, from the compact, irregular grids in works such as “Avalanche” (2023-25) to the kinetic orange dashes that skip across “Sparks” (2024). “In Beyond Time” (2025), Henderson balances large fields of cream and brown with the occasional patchwork of rainbow-colored striations.

Instead of describing the works, Henderson’s ambiguous, evocative, and often poetic titles offer insight into the concerns, philosophies, and influences distilled into his abstract canvases. “Here Today” (2024) – a loosely-gridded painting radiating with interlocking bands of color – elides the idiom’s second half (“Gone Tomorrow”), suggesting instead to focus mindfully on the present moment and all that it can offer. With a similarly expansive take on temporality, “The Next Blue Moon” (2025) – a work whose palette is reflected in its name – retools a turn of phrase typically used to denote a rare phenomenon, instead finding hope in the ever-present possibility of its recurrence.

Henderson’s new paintings are exhibited in dialogue with a selection of small works from the 1990s and 2000s, all on view for the first time. The artist calls these his “worry paintings,” pieces he returns to every now and then until something in them “comes into focus.” The exhibition also includes a selection of Henderson’s 16mm films from the 1970s and 1980s, many of which have been acquired and restored by the Academy Film Archive. Politically charged and often wickedly funny, these productions range from powerful “talking blues films” about Black experience to improvisational compositions and absurd musings. Shown together, the varied works in Truth, Love, and Curiosity reveal the artist’s penchant for play and experimentation, and a lifelong commitment to creative freedom.

Mike Henderson: Truth, Love, and Curiosity coincides with the second annual Nexus: SF/Bay Area Black Art Week (October 1 to 5, 2025), as well as a number of institutional exhibitions that include Henderson’s work. People Make This Place: SFAI Stories at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (July 26, 2025 to July 5, 2026) and Far Out: Northern California Art From The di Rosa Collection at the di Rosa Art Center for Contemporary Art’s new San Francisco exhibition space (August 2 to October 4, 2025) feature paintings from the 1960s and 1980s respectively. In New York, Sixties Surreal at the Whitney Museum of American Art (September 24, 2025 to January 19, 2026) includes an early film.

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, MO, he moved to the Bay Area to attend the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) 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 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 (2019-2020).

His works have been collected by such institutions as the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; 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; 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 (2016); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France (2016); Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge, MA (2017); and Academy Museum, Los Angeles (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 University of California–Davis.